An Ordinary Star

By Carole Giangrande

In her last days, Sofia Fiore remembers a time of radiance and darkness. She lived in the Twenties, when the first Zeppelin flew over Manhattan and when a solar eclipse dazzled the Bronx, N.Y. Drawn to the wondrous, she never stopped seeing extraordinary things. In the shadows of Depression and war, she reveres her father, the good Dr. Gentile, a na?ve follower of Mussolini, her mother Livia, whose fading light heralds her death and her anarchist grandparents living on the lower East Side of Manhattan. She witnesses the dramatic escape of her beloved Aunt Julia and Uncle Paul from the flaming Hindenburg - only to see them vanish. Many years later, Sofia is stricken by a missing chunk of the past as it smashes through memory. As she's dying, she grapples with a time that began in hope and ended in uncertainty until she comes to terms with her family's legacy of truth, illusion, and wonder.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1896951562
• ISBN13: 9781896951560
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Cormorant Books
• Length: 320 Pages

Customer Reviews

Einstein and the Impressionists Would Have Loved It

I've just finished An Ordinary Star and in my humble opinion, North America has its own Umberto Eco. Before I started Giangrande's book, I read Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, in which he does for Italy's wartime history what Giangrande does for the 20th century Italian-American experience in New York City. But the book has a distinct advantage over Eco's and that is its accessibility -- Giangrande allows the reader to move quickly through a vast city scape so that one has the sensation of really living it. I was also taken by Giangrande's sense of light and its ability to project characters through time. I think this novel shares common ground with the French Impressionists, whose use of light conjured up memory and longing. Giangrande's handling of detail provided a great sense of texture and place. At the same time, she has the ability to whip us around the corners of our imagination leaving us with a true sense of the ethereal. You know how people always talk about history "unfolding"? Well, Giangrande managed through some metaphysical trick to fold time for the reader, so that it became reasonable to see time as a continuous fabric -- no small achievement. A great melding of history, ethnic experience and truly human characters!

Truth Illusion and Wonder

What stands out for this reader is Carole Giangrande's artistic mastery of her language. Similes and metaphors float effortlessly throughout the novel like the story's Zeppelin, floating above Manhattan - a wondrous extraordinary sight,but a reminder to post 9/11 readers of the fragility of life. This reader was drawn into the well descripted Italian characters with all their angst, for Giagrande possess an intimate understanding of the cultural and religious complexities of the Italian Catholic family. That's not to say the plot is secondary. It is not. Birth and death, war and depression, and even the unmentionable "incest" are parcel of plot and character. An Ordinary Star is a page turner.