When Gia Scarpino left home for college, she and her three best friends, Barbara Arminavage, Yozo Walenticonis, and Willie Cunningham, promised to remain close. In high school, the four had been inseparable; Barbara, an optimistic dreamer, Yozo, the class underachiever, and Willie, Gia's first love. But Gia never returned, and their friendships withered. Now, 35 years later, Gia comes home to see her terminally ill Uncle Tony--and for the chance to reunite with old friends.
Though Gia is no longer the girl she once was, she is surprised by the changes in her friends. Yozo has formed an intimate friendship with Uncle Tony and is a wealthy and respected entrepreneur. Barbara has destroyed herself and her family with alcohol; while Willie, who had spent years holding on to hope for Gia's return, has become a priest. As the euphoria of their reunion wears off, the friends face the grim reality of their personal failures and the dangerous consequences of the dormant passions that linger between them.
Dust off your catechism, dig up your pasta machine, and prepare to be completely enveloped in the Italian Catholic culture of Annette Appollo's The Last One Home. Appollo's carefully developed characters and authentic touches bring this world to life, where quirky details and surreal moments prevent the danger of suffocation by nostalgia--and some predictable and not-so-predictable twists capture the reader's attention and heart. --Nancy R.E. O'Brien
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Gia Scarpino, a middle-aged lawyer, returns to the Pennsylvania coal town of her childhood to see her dying Uncle Tony, who raised her. During her weeklong visit, Gia catches up with her high school friends: Willie, her onetime sweetheart, now a handsome Jesuit priest; Yozo, a wise-cracking entrepreneur; and Barbara, an alcoholic trapped in a loveless marriage. As Tony fades, Gia and friends reminisce and revisit the hangouts of their youth. Willie must wrestle with his conscience and the demands of his vocation when he realizes that he has never stopped loving Gia. Meanwhile, as Gia comes to terms with losing Uncle Tony, her aunts, Tony's sisters, must come to terms with her. Everyone must come to terms with Tony's vague Mafia connections, and readers must reconcile to a bevy of sideswipes at the church, including nuns who beat children and a priest who has sex in a graveyard. Appollo's first novel aspires at once to pathos, psychology, ethnography and political argument: it seeks to move readers with Gia's troubles, explain and explore the folkways of an Italian-American family, reflect lyrically on the passage of the time and the meanings of death, and to attack organized religion. But the subplots and meanings get in one another's way, and no single character emerges with a rich personal history. An improbable happy ending can't save it.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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