Review by Booklist Review
Widower, widow. Uxoricide. Orphan. Patricide. Infanticide. And yet missing from that harrowing vocabulary is a word for "parents who lose children. Who don't murder them, but lose them." Irina becomes that kind of grieving parent when her six-year-old daughters vanish. She's recently separated from husband Mathias, their cleaving rather civil. One weekend, Mathias disappears with Alessia and Livia. He's found dead by suicide, but nothing is known of the girls. The investigations seem inept--Mathias' muddy boots are never analyzed, eyewitness sightings never followed up. Irina is left forever unknowing. She repeatedly draws parallels between her life and that of her American great-grandmother whose daughter, born of an extramarital affair 90 years before the twins, was also "taken away by the man she loved, never to see her again." Award-winning Italian journalist De Gregorio hauntingly ciphers Irina Lucidi's real-life 2011 tragedy in her second novel, her first to be Anglophoned, and deftly so, by Brit Botsford. Comprised of letters to relatives and officials, personal inquiries and analyses, memories and dreams, de Gregorio's slim narrative proves to be a dense, impassioned accomplishment.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
De Gregorio effectively captures the anxiety and disorientation experienced by a woman during a traumatic crisis in this provocative and splintered English-language debut. The details are revealed in short fragmented chapters, which mirror the tortured psyche of lawyer Irina three years after her two daughters disappeared following their kidnapping by her husband, Mathias, who died by suicide. The reader is challenged to put together the pieces of the plot, which come slowly together like a puzzle. For example, the identity of the writer in an opening italicized chapter, addressed directly to Irina, is not initially revealed. This epistolary thread continues intermittently through the novel, becoming uncomfortably more intimate. Irina is introduced writing a letter to her grandmother and alluding to her grief. Later, she reimagines her romance and marriage to Mathias, who in hindsight feels like a stranger to her. Unanswered questions plague Irina, such as the reasoning behind Mathias's loving death notice published by his mother. There's a great deal of intrigue as Irina searches for answers and comfort--alternately from a therapist, a judge, the girls' teacher, and a detective--which builds on an unsettling theme of horror churning beneath the surface. This will transfix readers. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Inspired by a heartbreaking true story, De Gregorio's remarkably restrained novel follows the events that ripple out in the aftermath of tragedy. The story is simple but mysterious. Shortly after Italian attorney Irina separates from her controlling Swiss husband, Mathias, he disappears with their twin 6-year-old daughters. Five days later, he kills himself, and the girls are nowhere to be found. The police are of little help, and Irina is left to try to assemble a new life for herself, always hoping the children will somehow be located. By the time the novel takes place, several years have passed, and Irina, though still grief-stricken, has fallen in love with gentle Spaniard cartoonist Luis and is surprised to find that suddenly "everything feels like a surprise and a gift." De Gregorio constructs her brief but potent novel out of sharp fragments: There are letters from Irina to her beloved grandmother and to the marriage counselor who refused to speak to her after Mathias disappeared, Irina's matter-of-fact recollections of the events leading up to the kidnapping, and lists of things that make Irina angry (the inefficiency of the police) or happy (humpback whales and "red wine, when it's good"). There are also sections labeled "Me About You," in which the narrator, a writer who has become close to Irina, lets loose her own emotions about the case and her feelings about how Irina has survived. It's a story about that "missing word" of the title, a word lacking in most languages, a word for parents who have lost children, and the narrator affirms that "losing a child is the touchstone of grief, the gold standard of pain." The daring of the novel is that Irina is not defined simply by that loss, as she might be in a lesser one: Her life is shaped by the disappearance of the children but not destroyed by it. A quietly devastating but somehow hopeful tale. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
