The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia
In 1960, educated and idealistic 27-year-old Francesca Loftfield, an Italian-American, flees her marriage to an Italian man she loves. She goes to a primitive and brutal mountain town in Southern Calabria on an altruistic mission.
Francesca is the first-person narrator of this novel, and she recounts her experiences from the perspective of a successful woman 60 years after her adventure. But the detailed narration of her time in Santa Chionia loses nothing in its immediacy. Francesca must find enough children in the town to open a school, which will, theoretically at least, offer opportunities for the students to become educated further and so break the cycle of poverty and ignorance the town has suffered through for many generations. In the process of trying to identify suitable students from the local families, she also becomes embroiled in the secrets surrounding the lost boy of Santa Chionia, whose identity is a many-layered, dangerous mystery. Her attempts to solve this mystery add a layer of suspense to the novel.
The plot is rich in both geographical detail and vibrant personalities. It includes two floods that further isolate the townspeople, threatened transfer of the villagers to a new location, and treacherous mountains; add no phone and poor postal service to the sense of isolation. Grames’s colorful characters, most of whom try to frustrate her heroine’s idealistic zeal, range from downtrodden wives, wily politicians, abusive husbands, and garrulous widows, to a duplicitous priest and a politically complacent doctor.
At heart, this novel is a feminine epic about an intelligent, altruistic woman who is searching for her personal identity and her purpose in society. It is well worth reading.
