Review by Booklist Review
During the summer of 1996, in the Italian countryside, 12-year-old Valentina experiences unsettling changes that alter her life forever. One evening, she finds blood in her underwear, from her first period, and blood seeping in from a crack in the wall. Her family's livestock becomes unexpectedly diseased. Frogs and flies overrun their home. Boils appear on Valentina's body, which her stern Catholic grandmother sees as a curse for unrepentant sins; her flighty mother sees them as happenstance. The neighborhood calls all three women witches. As Valentina explores her growing sexuality and deals with her relationships with friends and boys, she comes to believe that these horrifying things are all her fault. Yet, as she later learns, all three women carry their own guilt, secrets, and regrets that bind them to their family home, "the blind house," and to each other. Using the biblical story of the ten plagues of Egypt, Manfredi's debut is a coming-of-age story that showcases, with powerful descriptions and poetic prose, the intergenerational clash and unspoken guilt between three women.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Manfredi's English-language debut is an evocative tale of one young woman's coming-of-age in 1990s rural Italy. Valentina is 12, an only child living in an ancient crumbling farmhouse with her pious grandmother and troubled mother. Valentina wakes one morning to a spreading stain on her bedroom wall, which she believes corresponds to the shame she feels about having her first period. Terrified of her body's changes and troubled by her grandmother's references to a family curse and biblical retribution, Valentina decides she has brought on a plague. Hundreds of tiny frogs followed by mosquitoes, flies, and locusts then descend on the house and vegetable farm, and the sheep begin dying of a terrible disease, all of which Valentina tries to deal with by sacrificing a goat. Meanwhile, her mother is busy wooing a new boyfriend, her grandmother rapidly descends into terminal illness, and her best friend has broken off their friendship out of jealousy over a local boy. The melodious prose enhances the coming-of-age scenes and Valentina's religious guilt ("it came at night, when all terrible things happen, and like all terrible things, it decided to give me a choice," she narrates about her period), but too often the plot points are dropped or unexplained. Though it feels unresolved overall, the accomplished prose is a testament to Manfredi's potential. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three generations of Italian women living under one roof might be witches or might just be trying to live their lives; point of view is everything. During the summer of 1996, 12-year-old Valentina gets her period for the first time. Unprepared for the situation, she keeps it to herself initially, the first step in her developing awareness of her sexuality and its related power. Among many subsequent and, perhaps, surreal occurrences recounted by Valentina, the odd-looking house her family has occupied for generations also seems to begin bleeding. Referred to as "the blind house" by others in their rural, agrarian community, Valentina's home lacks windows facing those who approach it and is the site of numerous unusual phenomena as her story unfolds. After the departure of Valentina's father for a job in Russia, the house is occupied by Valentina, her young mother (whose choices in life were circumscribed by her teenage pregnancy), and her scrupulously religious grandmother, who tends to the family's farm. A series of plagues--closely resembling those described in Exodus--appears to descend upon the homestead and prompts Valentina's ailing grandmother to attribute blame for what she believes to be a curse on the household. Interfering with those calculations of guilt are the secrets Valentina's family has held for generations. As frogs, mosquitos, maggots, and boils (among other horrors) descend on the family, Valentina endeavors to make sense of her place in a world inhospitable to girls seeking freedom and within a family where secrets reign over truths. Manfredi delivers Valentina's narrative, as translated by Oklap, in a straightforward and unapologetic tone consistent with the bravado and insecurities of adolescence. Familial truth emerges, one way or another, but it may take a few generations before it can be seen. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
