The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call 'Summer sisters' is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor.

Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house her brother has muscular dystrophy her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. The question that preoccupies them both-and the author-is: Will Gabe ever be able to kill people with the brio required?Ĭarcaterra (Sleepers, 1995) knows how to keep a story moving, but by now it’s such a tired story that those romanticized Mafiosi can no longer make their bones.

So Angelo trains Gabe, preparing the definitive gangster’s curriculum for him to study. Angelo’s heart’s desire is to have Gabe follow in his footsteps and be the kind of model career criminal the code was invented to justify. Moreover, he owes a great deal to Angelo, who took him off the streets and gave him all he knows of home and family. From the time he began running numbers at age ten for racketeer kingpin Angus McQueen, Angelo has believed that the code would redeem him, that if he adhered to it his behavior (no matter how murderous) would be estimable in his peers’ eyes and self-affirming in his own. Granted, Angelo is a gangster, has always been a gangster, enjoys being a gangster, has grown rich being a gangster-nevertheless, Gabe insists, he is a principled gangster. That would be “the code.” Angelo’s unswerving commitment to its rigid, demanding precepts is, in Gabe’s view, downright chivalric. True, Gabe acknowledges, for most of his life Angelo has been something of a killing machine, but there’s an upside. Gabe venerates Angelo as a man of honor, and it’s through him that much of Vestieri’s story is told. Yet another of those tedious underworld novels in which Godfathers and Galahads tend to overlap, this time in early 20th-century New York.Īfter a long and sanguinary run, boss Angelo Vestieri lies dying, while a young man we know only as Gabe keeps a loving vigil by his bedside.

Gangster by lorenzo