Review | It’s easy to see why Ann Napolitano’s novel was chosen: like her previous book, “Dear Edward,” this one chronicles life’s highs and lows with precision
Overlooked and neglected at home, William’s only solace becomes his love of basketball. The sole place he feels comfortable is a court with a hoop, and his social contacts are mostly limited to his school teammates, who watch with amazement as he reaches the towering height of 6-foot-7. When the sports scholarship he earns to Northwestern University allows him to leave his lonely home for the Chicago area, his parents bid him farewell, seeming not to care whether they ever see him again.
He meets Julia, the oldest sister, in a college history class, and she soon introduces him to her three siblings. At first, he finds them indistinguishable, each sporting the same unruly curly hair, and in person, as in old photos, looking “deeply similar, like they were four different versions of the same person.”
Only on closer acquaintance does William begin to discern their differences. Charming and energetic, Julia is also bossy, controlling and ambitious. Sylvie is younger than Julia by 10 months and is her closest confidante, but she is contrastingly soft-spoken, bookish and romantic, dreaming of a perfect soul mate even as she makes out with random boys in the library stacks.
Napolitano emphasizes the sisters’ fondness for likening themselves to the four heroines of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little WomenBut the siblings put me more in mind of the unconventional families Anne Tyler often portrays in her novels. Like Tyler’s characters, who can sometimes hardly bear to go beyond the comfort zone of their Baltimore neighborhood, the Padavanos stay mostly in Pilsen, their beloved working-class corner of Chicago.
But Napolitano’s voice is her own. Like her deeply felt characters, she compels us to contemplate the complex tapestry of family love that can, despite grief and loss, still knit us together. She helps us see ourselves — and each other — whole.
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