Honey
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Meet a woman as tenacious as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and as irresistible as Andrew Sean Greer’s Arthur Less: Honey Fasinga, the glamorous daughter of a notorious New Jersey mobster, is returning home at last, ready to reckon with her violent past.
As a rebellious teenager, Honey managed to escape her father’s circle of influence and reinvent herself in a world of art and beauty, working for a high-end auction house in Los Angeles. Now in her twilight years, she decides to return home and unexpectedly falls in love. But in her family, nothing has changed. When her grandnephew Michael bursts into her life in what appears to be a drug-fueled frenzy, and her Lexus gets jacked, it’s hard to keep minding her own business. As old cruelties begin to resurface, Honey is no longer sure what she really wants—to forgive or to avenge.
This electrifying literary breakout from PEN USA Award-winning author Victor Lodato is a masterful and deeply moving portrait of love in all its forms, of moral ambiguity, and of inspiring change—a story of female rage that asks the question: What are the limits of compassion in a world gone mad?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the diverting latest from Lodato (Edgar and Lucy), a "spritely" 82-year-old woman moves back to the New Jersey town where she was raised by her mob boss father. Ilaria "Honey" Fasinga has spent most of her adult life putting distance between herself and her family, first by attending Bryn Mawr as an art history major and then by working at auction houses in New York and Los Angeles. Now, in retirement, she's fulfilled a prediction made by her late father more than 60 years earlier: "I know you come back." Her nephew, Corrado, runs the family's shadowy business, and while trying to make peace with him, Honey finds herself with a new set of problems—among them, finding out why her troubled grandnephew, Michael, is on the outs with his family; protecting a friendly neighbor, Joss, from her abusive boyfriend; and fending off the romantic advances of a talented and much younger painter, Nathan Flores. By simultaneously acknowledging and denying her age, Honey stands as a rewarding example of always being open to new experiences, and her combination of vulnerability and toughness calls to mind Aunt Augusta, the senior-citizen heroine of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt. Lodato exhibits a gift for excitement in his stimulating tale.
