Three Dreamers

March 1, 2021

Known for crime thrillers set in the Italian-American underworld that his father inhabited, Carcaterra tells in this memoir of the women in his life to whom he owes his inspiration and success. His mother and grandmother were from Ischia, off the coast of Naples, and his summers spent there with his grandmother were his one refuge from his parents' disastrous marriage. Having lived through severe privations and strain in World War II, she treats him with a level of respect for his potential that he received nowhere else. His mother's story is chilling, and her relationship with Carcaterra leaves many unanswered questions even as he obviously values it. His wife was a successful newspaper reporter and taught him the art of writing as they fell in love. Their partnership provides the calm missing from his life, and her early death devastates. The author's storytelling is engaging and his love obvious, yet the inner lives and motivations of his subjects remain elusive, beyond their effect on him. VERDICT Fans of Carcaterra's novels and reporting will appreciate the background on his life and inspiration, and this reflective memoir gives nuance to the dark world he portrays in his novels.--Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2021
Carcaterra heard remarkable stories on his visits as a teenager to the beautiful island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples. How his grandmother helped move secret shipments of wine off the island under the noses of the Nazis to get money for clothes. How one night, as she was smuggling food under her dress, a soldier held her at gunpoint, and she simply told him she was going to walk past him, and did. But it was also on the island, a far cry from his usual life with his abusive, irresponsible father in Hell's Kitchen, New York, that his mother told him his father had murdered his first wife. With keen perception and even-keeled acceptance, Carcaterra shares the stories of his grandmother, mother, and wife as he traces how their relationships encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. Even the harshness of his mother serves as fuel to work harder, earning her recognition that, despite her fears, he became a much better man than his father.

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March 1, 2021
Carcaterra recounts the lives of three remarkable women in his life. The child of Italian immigrants to New York, Carcaterra returned to his family seat on the island of Ischia when he was 14. "The sounds, smells, sights were all foreign," he recalls, "but somehow I knew from those very first moments it was a world where I belonged." He fell under the tutelage of a grandmother who could be a touch scary but who offered shelter from his abusive father back home and whose approach to life was utterly practical and consistently charming. Flowery Ischia beckoned each summer, and Carcaterra learned more stories--e.g., about his grandmother's fierce and fearless resistance in the face of the island's Nazi occupiers during World War II. The second strong woman in the story is the author's mother, who bore the death of her first husband and a child with a grim stoicism and sadness that forever haunted her. "I would have loved to meet the happy version of my mother....That young woman remains a mystery to me," Carcaterra writes affectingly. He received a glimpse when, working as a fledgling journalist with an editor with whom he would fall in love--his third subject--he wrote a profile of his mother that required her to appear at a photo session. Even though she was mistrustful at first, she shined brightly. The most difficult reading--and likely the most difficult writing for the author--comes with his portrait of that editor, who became his wife (he courted her with a think piece on the Three Stooges). Sadly, she died too young, leaving him with children of his own to continue the legacy: "Each time I see them, I hear her voice and I see her smile and I feel her love through them." Elegantly and sensitively written, a book that forges strong connections across four generations.

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Starred review from April 5, 2021
Carcaterra (Sleepers) pays a moving tribute to his grandmother, mother, and wife in this heartfelt account of how they shaped him. A fearless advocate for her family during the Nazi occupation of Naples in WWII, Carcaterra’s “Nonna” Maria lost a son during the invasion and, through her resilience, taught him about courage, forgiveness, and generosity. His mother, Raffaela, however, “presented me with a different picture,” Carcaterra notes. She stayed married to an abusive husband who’d murdered his first wife and cheated countless people, and her “words to me, sometimes kind, often bitter, gave fuel to my desire to live as far from such misery as possible,” Carcaterra writes. In 1976, while working at the New York Daily News, Carcaterra met the third woman who would profoundly impact his life: Susan Toepfer, a brilliant editor who became his wife of three decades and mother of his two children. In the book’s introduction, Carcaterra reveals that Susan died from the same cancer that took his mother’s life. With spare yet resounding prose, Carcaterra follows these women from his childhood home in Hell’s Kitchen to the Italian island of Ischia, to the battles each of them fought at the end of their lives. This emotional narrative isn’t for the fainthearted, but its beauty is a thing to behold. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME.