In a glass house

Nino Ricci's first novel, The Book of Saints, was accorded high critical acclaim and popular success for its haunting portrayal of a young Italian boy's view of his mother's fall from grace. This second novel follows Ricci's young hero, Vittorio Innocente, from Italy to the New World, and from the arms of his mother into the uncomfortable haven of a family he hardly knows and a country whose every feature feels alien to him. Living under the watch of his troubled father, a greenhouse-keeper, Victor and his younger half-sister, Rita, come of age in a farming community whose ways are both magical and mysteriously forbidding. Ricci is a writer gifted with the ability to summon memorable images and characters: the delicate paradise of a greenhouse, the loneliness of a man who cannot voice his feelings, and the slow flowering of a young man's intelligence from the soil of his family into a larger world.