Customer Reviews

Father Sandro's Money

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What a fantastic book! You need to read this work of art!

This story is about the trials and tribulations of the LaRosa family. You will follow the family from Italy to America. Your heart will ache for Maria as she bids goodbye to her husband and two of her sons.

Experience the joy they must have felt as the two are reunited and start their lives over in the New World. Share in the wonders of their lives and mourn their losses.

You will laugh and cry in this riviting, emotion packed novel. Wow! What a creative woman K Spirito is to have given birth to such an excentric family and to have placed them in actual events in time.

The book was well titled and very fascinating. The research that was done was well noticed. I enjoyed the book for it was one I didn't want to put down it took me a day and a half. In fact I have read it twice. The things that a mother will do for her childred are so true as she has written. How everything came together at the end was great.

Father Sandro's Money is an intricate story of the LaRosa family who escape from poverty and an abusive priest in Italy to build a new life in the United States. K weaves the fictional story into true historical events with descriptive details. You can almost smell the molasses in the streets of Boston!

Once you start this book, it is almost impossible to put down until you have finished it. You will find yourself cheering on Maria and her family as they overcome obstacles and become successful in their new homeland. A wonderful read, can't believe it is K's first published work. I eagerly anticipate more books from her in the future.

Set back in Italy, in 1910, Maria Avita is taking care of her six children. She often thinks about her husband and two oldest sons who left Italy for America. Joseph wrote letters saying there were great opportunities in America, and he will send for them soon. Well, not soon enough, thought Maria Avita. There were many hardships in Italy. With very little to no money, she had to provide for herself and the children.

Louisa, the oldest girl, had to take care of her siblings, while Maria went into town to get food. There was hardly any kindling to make a fire in the cold damp months of spring. Maria had to get to America faster somehow!

A young priest always made his rounds to the houses everyday to make sure families contributed their meager earnings to the church; which he would collect. He also went to the houses for other reasons. To seek out the young girls and make sure they paid their dues to him also.

But he made a mistake when he went after young Louisa. For when Maria Avita saw Father Sandro on top of her daughter and heard her muffled cries, that was the end of him, and the beginnings of new opportunities for the LaRosa family.

That was only on the first few pages! The rest of the story is how she and Joseph survived in America. There, they started their lives anew together. There were many things that happened over the 30 years they lived in America. Their eight children lived and died through many events; The Molasses Flood, The Spanish Influenza and World War I.

K Spirito tells a wonderful, but very emotional story. I found myself crying at certain points because I was there with the LaRosa's, living through their times of triumph, and times of tragedy.

What a great storyteller!

This is a well-researched story, molding a fictional tale around actual events of an Italian immigrant family's new lease on life in Boston's North End.

It is also well-paced and descriptive, helping to immerse you into the actual scenes of the family's celebration of life, as well as the calamities that befall it, with former ties to its homeland returning to haunt it.

And through it all is Mama LaRosa's guiding hand, praising, scolding, encouraging, soothing ... 'til the very end.

I look forward to viewing this story on the large screen.