Emily B. reviewed on + 7 more book reviews
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Inland Sea is a beautifully written, poignant novel told in a series of twelve intricately connected stories depicting twenty-five years in the life of Vincent Torno and of the extremes of family and landscape that shape and haunt him.
Vincent Torno is the youngest child in an Italian-American family living in California's San Joaquin Valley. With a World War II veteran-businessman father whose conception of a logical, ordered world is both oppressive and reassuring, and a mother whose never-discussed mental illness and recurrent breakdowns crash through the family like waves, Vincent is a boy whose desire for understanding is particularly acute. But as he moves farther out into the world -- to the Midwest, Seattle, Manhattan -- he finds it hardly more comprehensible than his own family. And that which seemed most stable -- the landscape of his once-agricultural hometown -- is transformed with disorienting rapidity.
The Inland Sea is a beautifully written, poignant novel told in a series of twelve intricately connected stories depicting twenty-five years in the life of Vincent Torno and of the extremes of family and landscape that shape and haunt him.
Vincent Torno is the youngest child in an Italian-American family living in California's San Joaquin Valley. With a World War II veteran-businessman father whose conception of a logical, ordered world is both oppressive and reassuring, and a mother whose never-discussed mental illness and recurrent breakdowns crash through the family like waves, Vincent is a boy whose desire for understanding is particularly acute. But as he moves farther out into the world -- to the Midwest, Seattle, Manhattan -- he finds it hardly more comprehensible than his own family. And that which seemed most stable -- the landscape of his once-agricultural hometown -- is transformed with disorienting rapidity.
