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A Read with Jenna Pick (A Novel)
by Naomi Krupitsky
A captivating debut novel about the tangled fates of two best friends and daughters of the Italian mafia, and a coming-of-age story of twentieth-century Brooklyn itself.
Two daughters. Two families. One inescapable fate.
Sofia Colicchio is a free spirit, loud and untamed. Antonia Russo is thoughtful, ever observing the world around her. Best friends since birth, they live in the shadow of their fathers' unspoken community: the Family. Sunday dinners gather them each week to feast, discuss business, and renew the intoxicating bond borne of blood and love.
But the disappearance of Antonia's father drives a whisper-thin wedge between the girls as they grow into women, wives, mothers, and leaders. Their hearts expand in tandem with Red Hook and Brooklyn around them, as they push against the boundaries of society's expectations and fight to preserve their complex but life-sustaining friendship. One fateful night their loyalty to each other and the Family will be tested. Only one of them can pull the trigger before it's too late.
"Mario Puzo meets Elena Ferrante in Krupitsky's dynamite debut novel...Fans of Adriana Trigiani and Lynda Cohen Loigman will inhale this tense, engrossing novel about family ties, women's friendships, and the treacherous complications of loyalty." —Booklist (starred review)
"Insightfully imagining the lives of two Italian American girls born into the Mafia as they come of age and become mothers, Krupitsky has written a debut that readers will want to inhale with occasional pauses to savor her evocative descriptions." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Krupitsky beautifully captures [Sofia and Antonia's] day-to-day lives under never-ending tension. The women's rich stories make this worthwhile." —Publishers Weekly
"Fast-paced and readable, and the ebb and flow between Sofia and Antonia as secrets threaten their friendship propel the reader forward." —Kirkus Reviews
"A nuanced evocation of lifelong female friendship in all its shifting, messy, gorgeous complexity." —Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light
"Lyrical, gripping, and richly evocative." —Christina Schwarz, author of Drowning Ruth and Bonnie
This information about The Family was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Naomi Krupitsky was born in Berkeley, California, and attended NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She lives in San Francisco, but calls many places home. The Family is her first novel.
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