Angelina's Children
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Few gypsies want to be seen as poor, although many are. Such was the case with old Angelina’s sons, who possessed nothing other than their caravan and their gypsy blood. But it was young blood that coursed through their veins, a dark and vital flow that attracted women and fathered numberless children. And, like their mother, who had known the era of horses and caravans, they spat upon the very thought that they might be pitied.” So begins the story of a matriarch and her tribe, ostracized by society and exiled to the outskirts of the city. Esther, a young librarian from the town, comes to the camp to introduce the children to books and stories. She gradually gains their confidence, and accompanies them, as observer and participant, through an eventful and tragic year in all their lives.
Alice Ferney’s distinctive style powerfully involves the reader in the family’s roller-coaster existence, with its disasters, its comic moments and its battles against an uncomprehending, hostile world; in the love lives of the five boys, the bravery of the children, and eventually, in Angelina’s final gesture of defiance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alternately high-flown and gritty, this novel, the first U.S. release from French author Ferney, begins with a clich about Gypsy blood "a dark and vital flow that attracted women and fathered numberless children" but as the book progresses, the Romanies rise vividly above stereotype. The widowed Gypsy matriarch, Angelina, her five sons, their wives and children take up residence in an abandoned vegetable garden on the edge of a French town. A librarian, Esther Duvaux, decides to read aloud to the children, and over time she wins not only Angelina's consent but also her friendship. Love, both requited and not, figures large, as do generalizations like "destinies are unchangeable." But all rests on a foundation of flinty detail: the broken glass that litters the campsite, the stench of the trash fire that warms Angelina's family. Ferney also captures the Gypsies' marginalization in French society: the neglect and unfriendliness at the hospital where Angelina's youngest grandchild is born, Esther's efforts to get the town to allow the oldest grandchild into school and the struggle to keep her in once she's there. In Ferney's hands, the romance of the Gypsies becomes a meditation on life's harsh unpredictability and the joy to be found in its midst.
