Only 2 reviews this year--too many of my own book deadlines!
Seeds of the Pomegranate by Suzanne Uttaro Samuels
At the start of this remarkable debut novel, protagonist Mimi Inglese is forced by tuberculosis to curtail her training and promising future as a painter. Devoting her artistic talents to sketching, she creates images suitable for printing, and with encouragement from her godfather Zio, becomes an engraver herself, unaware of the consequences of his patronage and its impact on her and her extended family. When financial straits force the Inglese family to leave Sicily for New York, the shipboard life and Ellis Island arrival—and the overriding necessity of concealing Mimi’s disease—is extremely well depicted. She and her parents, intensely devout sister, and aging grandmother settle into a life not exactly as Zio had described. Her father’s shop is front for circulating counterfeit paper currency, forcing Mimi into collaboration with harsh criminal gangs who either work for or compete with Zio’s enterprise, and rely on her engraving and printing skills. Throughout the novel, her complex choices and bold actions are credible as she struggles to protect her relatives while planning an entirely separate and more fulfilling future for herself—possibly with the one person she feels able to trust.
The diverse company of characters, with all their fears and foibles, are brilliantly rendered. Samuels has created a thoroughly engrossing historical novel from aspects of her own family heritage, weaving complications and danger into the narrative with admirable skill and effective writing. A gripping story, from the first page to the last, and very highly recommended. (Sybilline Press, paperback/ebook, 381 pp., March 2025)
Behind the Red Velvet Curtain: An American Ballerina in Russia by Joy Womack
The American dancer’s experiences studying ballet in Moscow and performing in Russian ballet companies have been presented in a documentary and a feature film (Joika). Now delivered as a memoir, as told to journalist Elizabeth Shockman over a twelve-year period, the ballerina candidly shares struggles and strife as she sought to perfect her art and obtain a position in one of the world’s most historic and influential theatres. Raised in a large, eccentric, and devoutly Christian family, Joy was motivated, ambitious, and success-driven. Her dance training began at three years old, and ten years later she left her Austin home to study in Washington, D.C. at the Kirov Academy of Ballet. Steeped in Russian technique, she was inspired to apply to the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, the feeder school of the Bolshoi Ballet. The good fortune of acceptance was accompanied by the curse of a painfully cracked foot—something she was resolved to conceal from instructors and staff. Plunged into an academic program carried out in the Russian language, which she had to learn, she endured stringent ballet training, while simultaneously assimilating into a very foreign culture.
In pursuing her dream of eventually dancing at the Bolshoi, Womack confronted numerous challenges—foot surgery and recovery, an eating disorder and its adverse effects (fractured wrist), a Russian marriage of convenience that enabled her employment at the theatres of her dreams. But her pride in becoming the first American woman to perform with the Bolshoi—in the corps de ballet—and obtaining Russian citizenship was marred by a public relations disaster that resulted from speaking openly about offstage corruption. A transfer to the Kremlin ballet company offered temporary satisfaction, and the covid pandemic ended her fraught period at Boston Ballet. She returned to Russia with an American second husband as prima ballerina in lesser, more compatible ballet company. But Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine forced the surrender of her desire to remain in Russia.