L'Air du Temps (1985)
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In 1985, the shooting of Mr. Marfeo disrupts the quiet suburban neighborhood of Maple Bay and prompts thirteen-year-old Zinnia Zompa to reorganize everything she knows about her parents— their preoccupations, obsessions, and above all, their battles with each other. As her understanding of the world grows, Zinnia sees how the violence she witnesses is part of a larger pattern of domination, one that shadows the world far beyond her neighborhood, and her coming-of-age means reckoning with this darkness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Josefowicz (Ready, Set, Go) blends family drama with a crime story in her breezy if unbalanced latest. Zinnia Zompa, the novel's intuitive 13-year-old narrator, grows up in a dysfunctional family of four, and often takes out her angst on her younger sister ("Being mean to Zenobia makes me feel amazing. It fills me with icy joy"). The story opens in 1985 with the murder of Mr. Marfeo, the accountant for her father Skeets's costume jewelry factory, whose body is found in a Lincoln Mercury identical to one the Zompas had recently reported stolen. The men convicted of the murder are twin brothers who also worked for Skeets. Though the murder sets the stage for the plot, it feels tangential to the real story of Zinnia's parents' fraying marriage. When Pauline, her artsy and unfulfilled mom, airs a suspicion she shares with Zinnia about Skeets's involvement in Marfeo's killing, he defensively replies, "My fake beads aren't good enough for you." Unfortunately, the family's fears about Skeets's foul deeds never come to any kind of resolution. Still, Josefowicz provides plenty of rich period detail through the voice of her spunky heroine, who's dejected, for instance, when she fails to pull off a Dorothy Hamill wedge hairdo. Fiends for 1980s nostalgia ought to seek this out.
