Liberation

August 1, 2005
The morning after her 70th birthday party, attended by her dutiful husband and children, Adriana Rundel takes a commuter train from suburban New Jersey to Manhattan, and becomes lost in memories of her WWII girlhood as a Jew in hiding on the Italian isle of Elba. Stealing glances from her hideout in the cupboard, she finds her first love, a young AWOL Senegalese soldier named Amdu Diop, who takes refuge in her family's home during the Allied push toward liberation. He is 17; she is 10. Theirs is an innocent infatuation rather than an intense affair, but that seems to be precisely what Scott (The Manikin
) is after: "The truth was she liked Amdu because he was perfectly alive.... She just felt it, the way she felt the warmth of the sun." Their attachment is lovely, but doesn't provide much dramatic lift. And the heart attack Adriana suffers on the train ride into the city, which intermingles her childhood panic with her later-life mortal fear, is less a plot device than a means for integrating the vivid past with the dull present. Still, Scott accomplishes large shifts in time and perspective with grace, and delivers an affecting, unsentimental portrait of a survivor taking stock of her life and loves. Agent, Jeri Thoma
.

July 15, 2005
A Pulitzer Prize finalist for "The Manikin", Scott returns with a masterly story of memory and World War II. Soon after an emotional 70th birthday celebration, New Jersey matron Adriana Rundel collapses on a train. While striving for breath, she finds her mind looping back six decades to her childhood on Elba, off the west coast of Italy, and the terrifying days when French colonial military units swept across the island on behalf of the Allied forces. To keep her safe from marauding soldiers, relatives hide Adriana in a cupboard overnight but cannot stop the spunky child from exploring come daylight. When she discovers Amdu, a stranded young Senegalese soldier, the family's extension of sanctuary brings unforgettable, ineffable experiences to all concerned, especially the innocent little girl confounded by the violence of wartime "liberation." This novel veers challengingly from strict chronological narration to poetic yet precise prose to sensitive psychological insights, which makes for rich and rewarding reading. Recommended for most fiction collections. -Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2005
Returning to Elba, an island off the Tuscany coast, also the setting for her earlier " Tourmaline "(2002), Scott deftly whisks readers back in time to a cupboard in which Adriana Nardi silently hides from a new wave of invaders during World War II. It's clear from the beginning that this is a book to be savored line by line, as Adriana's stream-of-consciousness narration reveals her childish perspective on the nightmare of war and her relatives' infighting, as well as her first experience with love and compassion. Every scene contains emotionally charged images, from the brutal death of a girl raped by African soldiers to the miracles performed out of kindness by the wounded Senegalese boy Amdu. Writing in a lyrical, sometimes surreal style, Scott employs the same flashback techniques honed in her previous novels to juggle between Adriana in the present--age 70, suspended between breaths, possibly dying--and Adriana in the past, reliving a distant time when a stranger saved her life. A rich, multilayered literary novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)