Book Review: A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

Title: A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards
Published July 31, 2012; Amistad; Paperback
Genre: British fiction, contemporary fiction

About: A British-born woman, daughter of an immigrant mother from Montserrat, the West Indies, lives with the idea that she caused her mother's death years ago, and begins to discover the more complex truth when the two men in her mother's life resurface after a 14-year absence.

Comments: The coats referred to in the title play an important part in the story of Jinx's relationship with her mother. The story unravels slowly, with numerous flashbacks to the time when Jinx was a teenager, when her mother was alive and visited by the two men - her mother's volatile abusive lover Berris and a family friend, Lemon. The mother-daughter relationship as perceived by Jinx is the crux of this story.

Well written and with an easy pace, I enjoyed this novel as a welcome addition to emerging British immigrant fiction and Caribbean fiction.

Yvvette Edwards has lived in London all her life. She currently resides in the East End and is married with three children. A Cupboard Full of Coats, her first novel, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  It is also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours and the publisher for a review copy of this book.

For more reviews of A Cupboard Full of Coats, visit the book's tour schedule.
(Submitted for  Immigrant Stories 2012 Challenge).

Book Review: The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani

"But you love someone else,"she said, making an excuse to step away from him, even though she didn't want to.
"Sister Teresa says that when one girl breaks your heart, another comes along to mend it."
Enza smiled. (from the ARC, ch.6; final copy may differ)

A stack of vinyl records of the singer Enrico Caruso, owned by the author's grandmother Lucia, and ship records of Lucia's and her husband's separate trips to America in the early 1900s inspired Adriana Trigiani to write this novel.

This is a story of the meeting of two teens, Enza and Ciro, who live in villages at the foot of the Italian Alps, about their separate journeys to America to find a better life, their meeting again, and their married life together. It's the love story of the author's grandparents, as she imagines it might have been. The novel is a straightforward telling of their lives, set in three locations - the village of Bergamo in the Italian Alps, and then Manhattan and Minnesota in America.

In Italy in 1905, Ciro and his brother Eduardo are left by their impoverished and widowed mother at a convent, to be raised by the sisters of Saint Nicola. When the boys grow up, Eduardo enters the seminary in Rome; Ciro is sent to America to be apprenticed as a shoemaker to a relative of one of the sisters.

Before Ciro leaves, he meets a young girl Enza from the same region, but then loses track of her when he departs for America. Enza also travels to America, hoping to become a seamstress in New Jersey and send money home to help her family buy a much needed house.

Title: The Shoemaker's Wife: A Novel by Adriana Trigiani
Published April 3, 2012 by Harper; hardcover

Enzo and Ciro's paths cross again, several times over the years, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Many Italians left their home for America during the early 1900s, as did other European immigrants. The book helps to document one such family, in fiction, the reasons for their leaving, and their arrival and survival in America during two world wars. I found this book an excellent example of immigrant fiction and the historical novel.


Visit the author at http://adrianatrigiani.com/
 on her Facebook page, and Twitter account.

Click on TLC Book Tours for more information/reviews of The Shoemaker's Wife.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours and the publisher for an ARC of this novel.