US pub date: 7/23/24
Genre: historical fiction, suspense, literary fiction
Quick summary: Young American Francesca travels to Calabria to help create a nursery school for the insular community of 1960 Santa Chionia. She finds a town without a doctor or electricity - but with a recently discovered human skeleton that multiple residents want her to investigate.

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is one of my favorite books, so I was really excited to read Grames' latest! The beginning was really intriguing - I enjoyed getting to know the characters of this small Italian town (the town is a character in itself) and seeing Francesca try to adjust to her new life. Unfortunately, the story slowed down and got really confusing about halfway through - there were so many characters, and I found it hard to keep track of everything.

I think this could have been a new favorite for me if it had been ~75 pages shorter with 5 fewer characters. However, literary fiction readers used to complex plots might like this one more than I did!

Thank you to Knopf for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a very interesting book but was a bit difficult to read because there were so many subplots and so many characters (and characters with nicknames sometimes used, sometimes not). It was a bit difficult to keep everything and everyone straight while holding on to the main thread of the story. The main characters were all very well written and quite interesting. The small village of Santa Chionia in the Southern Italian mountains sounded simultaneously beautiful and horrible. Small-town justice meted out in so many ways made the story so very sad for some of the characters, including the main character. Besides the complex web of subplots, another complaint that I have of the book is that the author is prone to grandiloquence. I work at a university and the vast majority of our English professors do not pepper their writing with such an elaborate vocabulary. I think the words chosen, when other more commonly used words could have been used instead, diminished the story being told. I have a fairly rich vocabulary and I had to look up many words and that really slowed the story for me. I worry that many of the words used will be lost on a more casual reader. I find the word choice a bit funny actually since the story is told from the viewpoint of a woman who was trying to open a nursery school in a remote village in 1960s Italy where the vast majority of the inhabitants were illiterate.

An extraordinary house built of the highest quality material but missing plumbing and electricity

Helplessly original and a wonder, this book has violently captured my thoughts since its completion.

Grames has pulled off a remarkable feat—she has created a brilliant world, ripe with intriguing history and complex characters.

The story is set in rural 1960’s Italy in a seemingly charming village where the main character, Francesca, is a fly caught in an intricate web of connectivity—all of the villagers are, at the very least, loosely associated with each other, often tied together by glittering, secret history.

This delightful world and its characters have whispered to my imagination, and this is a book that I feel compelled to talk about.

It has some dazzling, startlingly real characters who at times can seem harsh yet warm.

Now, let’s talk very briefly about 2 other books with great worldbuilding: Gone with the Wind and Game of Thrones.

What do these epics have in common?

They are L-O-N-G!

Looking at Audible, GWTW is just over 49 hours and GOT is nearly 35 hours.

The problem is……….most books over 500 pages aren’t highly marketable.

So The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a hair over 400 pages, resulting in irrecoverable sacrifices.

It has three rocky plots: Francesca struggling to open a nursery (a preschool), a love triangle, and a murder mystery.

As far as the nursery, Francesca’s (and therefore the reader’s) connection to the village’s children is too generic. She doesn’t form a deep connection with specific children, so it is difficult to feel invested in this plotline. The stakes didn’t seem high enough.

The love triangle is also underdeveloped, bumbling and clumsy, with Francesca appearing to casually make random, contradictory, and bizarre decisions.

And the murder mystery….The ending was not satisfying, and the reader leaves with more questions than in the beginning.

There are also about a billion characters, and the book needs a family map like in A Suitable Boy. I would imagine the audiobook experience to be torturous.

This book haunts me, a tragedy, because it is bursting with potential—so thick are the rays of brilliance that they are actually visible! The author is clearly promising, and The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia unmistakably has many great things going for it. But the execution just isn’t there yet.

*Thanks, NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and unbiased opinion.

Knopf books provided an early galley for review.

Back at PLA in April of this year, I attended a panel where Grames talked about this novel. Having family myself that can be traced back to Italy, I thought it might be an interesting book to check out.

I have to admit that historical fiction set in other countries is not my usual choice. Add to that the Italian names of the villagers all tend to blur for me. So, it was a bit slower for me to get into this one. After getting through the first section of four (a bit more than a quarter of the way through), I decided to put this one aside and attempt to get back into it down the road when I can better focus on it.

I do have to say, however, that Grames uses her words to really paint the setting of Santa Chionia well. And this insular community setting presents a great challenge to Francesca's gathering of clues to solve a decades old mystery.

When 27-year-old American, Francesca Loftfield, arrives in the small southern Italian village of Santa Chionia in 1960, she is met with a world from a past decade, perhaps a past century. She works for a charity organization and has the challenging mission to open a nursery school. The town has no paved roads, no electricity, and no plumbing. Because of flooding that occurred recently, is no regular mail service. Many of the men are goatherds. This is only the beginning of Franca’s venture. As the flood waters recede, human remains are recovered. Thus, Juliet Grames has penned a 1960s Italian mystery saga, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia.

One of the older women wonders if the bones belong to her son, who disappeared years earlier, and she enlists the help of the maestra. Later, another woman insists that her husband, who had travelled to America to find work, has disappeared; she, too, implores Francesca to help her. Not wanting to disappoint the women, Francesca agrees. Not everyone, including her landlady Cicca, approve. Cicca, however, eventually becomes a confidant, as she seems knowledgeable of all things Chionia.

My interest waxed and waned as the pace of the story moves at varying rates. There are so many characters to keep track of that it is difficult to keep track of the good, the bad, and the unknown. Francesca seems to have a way with children and a tender, caring heart, especially toward the women of the village. The villagers stick to their traditions where men are head of the household. Franca, who had lived in Rome, is more modern and idealistic. Some residents are threatened by her and see her as meddling.

The plot meanders between the search for the two missing persons, working to establish the school, trying to help several of the women with their domestic problems, and Francesca’s personal life, which I will forego mentioning here. Suffice it to say that the final chapters bring the book to an urgent halt. Knowing Francesca as she is portrayed, it is understandable to finish to book this way, but I was not quite satisfied with the story. It struck me that the main character, Francesca, is also somewhat lost.

I received a digital copy of The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia in return for my honest review. My thoughts and opinions are my own. Thanks to NetGalley, Knopf, and the author.


3 stars

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC of The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia.

I think this book is a solid 3.5. It is entertaining, reading about an aid worker who has been tasked with establishing a preschool in an incredibly remote mountain village in Italy, and I enjoyed the story. However, some of the characters blended together and I had a hard time keeping track of everyone and their role in the village and in the story.

Ultimately, the reader, and the main character Franca, are left to sort out who was sincere, who was leading her astray, and the overlapping agendas and circumstances she encountered. Honestly, I’m not 100% certain whether we got to the bottom of the title mystery in this book (I think so?), but we encountered a few others through the course of the story.

Interesting and enjoyable.

I do not like failing to finish reading a book, but The Lost Boy of Chionia has been a real challenge on a number of levels. First, the story is extremely convoluted and it does not appear to be pointed in any redeeming direction. Second, the author, Juliet Grames, a self described “long time editor” should know better in her word choices. Maybe she is just a sesquipedalian?, but many of her word choices detracted from the story rather than moving it along.

I enjoyed the setting of the story, a tiny village in the Aspromonte Mts in Southern Calabria, Italy. But it was tedious and slow. I stopped reading twice, but finally prevailed only to be disappointed with the ending. I think Ms Grames has lots of potential as an author, she just needs a good editor to help her along.

I thank the publisher and NetGalley for a providing a copy of this work for an unbiased opinion.

I started reading this book while on a tour of southern Italy and NW Sicily. there is so much to understand about the culture of southern Italy and it's people. This book is a perfect look at a place and time and a perfect setting for the kafkaesque trials of our heroine as she attempts to understand where she is and who the "lost boy of Santa Chionia is. The ending? well no spoilers but it fits with the people the time and the environment.
Read this book it is well written and researched.

Francesca goes to a foreign country in Cambodia to set up a nursery school for the poor town of Santa Chionia. The children of the town have never had a chance at education. While trying to find children that will be allowed to attend and working on trying to put the school together,a skeleton is discovered beneath an old building.. Her world is thrown into chaos when one of the women in the town asks her to help prove that it is the body of her son who mysteriously disappeared many years before. She faces increasing hostility from the townspeople. Then another woman asks her to prove that it is her husband, who also mysteriously disappeared.. She is able to find out what happened to both men,but finds herself betrayed by the person she was trying to help get out of an abusive relationship.
This book was a little slow at times but I did enjoy it. I would have liked to find out more about the main character rather than trying to piece it together. I was definitely surprised at the end when the doctor told her that the skeleton was that of a woman and left it there

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a mystery set in a remote mountain village in Calabria in 1960. Francesca is an idealistic American woman setting up a nursery to combat child mortality rates. There is no running water or electricity.
After days of torrential rain and flooding, a skeleton is found under the post office. Franca is asked to look into it by some village women.
It is an interesting tale with details how Calabrian life was back then it is very wordy and gets bogged down at times. I liked it but it is very long.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC.

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia was a hard read for me, although interesting enough that I never contemplated giving up. A somewhat naive (well, it was 1960) 27 year old American from a rather privileged background is transplanted to rural Calabria, to a town without running water, a resident physician, or even a good road in and out of the town. From an academic family, and on track to become an academic herself, Francesca gave up her plans to marry a dashing Italian. A fairly classic case of marry in haste, repent at leisure, when she decides to leave the marriage she discovers that divorce is all but impossible in Italy at that time. She reinvents herself as part of an agency that brings early childhood education to impoverished rural areas, arriving in Santa Chiona to open a nursery school. She is, unsurprisingly, met with distrust, and experiences horrible culture shock, although she strives to carry out her "mission." Francesca becomes involved in the search for some long missing men after a flood washes out the post office, exposing a skeleton. She runs afoul of the established patriarchy of the region.

I started reading this while on vacation...not a good choice for a vacation book! Too dark and convoluted, and unfortunately the ending, while not entirely a surprise, felt rather flat. Nonetheless, an interesting tale. Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the opportunity to read the eArc.

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames

The story of this novel occurs in the 1960s, as recalled by today’s narrator, who during that earlier time worked as a 27 year old nursery school organizer in a remote mountain village for an Italian charitable organization. While I respected the author’s approach of trying to make the setting come alive through extensive descriptions and sophisticated vocabulary, I had difficulty in feeling any real connection with this long-ago, isolated Calabrian community, its antiquated Greco language, its inhabitants or the narrator. I had limited interest in the setting which was severely disconnected from the rest of the world, and became impatient with what I felt was the author’s determination to inform and educate me with meandering sidelines and characters, before she provided any hint of a storyline. The mystery, when it was finally revealed, involved a disappearance forty years earlier, and thus I felt little urgency in reading to uncover the truth. Despite the author’s considerable research and superior writing, I felt that this book did not deliver sufficient character appeal, pacing or suspense, especially considering its 400 page length.


Thank you to Net Galley and Knopf for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

An okay read but at over 400 pages it is a muddled and distracting mystery to plow through.

2.5☆

Thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for letting me read an eARC of The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames. The novel was an interesting read that kept me invested until the end. The investment was solely due to the intriguing mystery at the heart of the plot and the well-written characters surrounding it. The pacing lagged somewhat near the middle of the story, but it did not deter my enjoyment overall. I would recommend the novel to mystery fans.

A well-intentioned young American woman setting up a nursery school in a remote cliffside southern Italian village in the early 1960s gets reluctantly pulled into researching the fate of two village men when a flood reveals a skeleton in the ruins of the post office. Headstrong and nursing a past romance, Francesca slowly realizes learns how much she doesn't understand about the village operates. She finds allies but also becomes increasingly uncertain about her safety in light of all of the undercurrents. Excellent character development and pacing; beautiful, sometimes unsettling setting.

This sweeping tale of historical fiction follows Francesca Loftfield, an American woman working with an international aid agency to build a nursery school in the tiny, isolated town of Santa Chionia, located in the treacherous mountains of Calabria. Battling both nature, in the form of floods and snowstorms that knock out the one bridge that connects the town to others and the electricity and spotty telephone service, and the townspeople who may be plotting against her, Francesca has her work cut out for her. But she believes there’s nothing that will stop her. Until a flood unearths a skeleton underneath the destroyed post office.

Suddenly, Francesca is thrust into the middle of the mystery, where a few want her to help them find out the identity of the skeleton, but most of the townspeople seem obstinantly uninterested, or worse. Francesca finds herself seeking answers that only unearth more secrets the villagers want to stay hidden. Increasingly unsure of who she can trust, Francesca becomes socially isolated, even as the harsh weather and unstable infrastructure of the Calabrian mountains physically isolate her even more.

Grames sets her mystery during the tumultuous 1960s, when roles for women were changing, in many places, if not in Santa Chionia. Calabria, the fabled home of brigands and outlaws, was also facing its own upheaval during this period. Whole villages in the remote mountains were relocating to cities only to have their culture and their identities swallowed up by the much denser coastal towns. The tale, expertly told, woven from some of the most beautiful sentences I have read in some time, ushers the reader through a time and place so harrowing and beautiful, the village lives and breathes on the page.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the opportunity to read an advance review copy.

Calabria, 1960. A remote backward village full of secrets, bound by customs and family ties "Francesca [Franca, who many call maestra] Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed [idealistic] American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail." Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When an old woman begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions." And so it begins.

Francesca is determined to find out who the body is and why things are the way they are in this village [extremely patriarchal and traditional], but also to bring preschool education to this backwater. Add in corruption, many more characters: including a priest, a doctor [from afar] a mailman from the next town, a communist, a mayor, and more--there are so very many characters/families/member and moving parts that I sometimes found it hard to keep track. For Francesca, the outsider, the language also was a barrier--fluent in Italian, but dialect, and sometimes Greco.

Add in Franca's back story--her parents, her friends, and her Italian husband, Sandro, and it gets more complex. Then add in Ugo, a local love interest--oh my!

Franca lives with Cicca, her cranky landlady [who I found endearing] and--who communicates with her dead sister, Peppinedda.

Convoluted and perhaps unnecessarily complicated, nonetheless, I found this book often charming.

Phrases/descriptions I liked:
"I turned my Amercian dentistry on each of the men"
"I felt the menace of his physicality"
"twitching with energy"
"none of the eggplant silhouette one becomes accustomed to in priests"
"arresting quality of sloping bosom"
"man with gray hairs that draped like roof tiles over his ears"

New words for me:
nepenthe
kwashiorkor
ferule

No spoiler but I did not care for the ending.

I wanted to read this book as it sounded interesting and I was going to Calabria for 5 days [60+ years afterwards]--but the description of Pizzo still fit the picture!

3.5, cannot round up.

The Lost Boy of Chionia
While the prose was rambling at times, adding to character confusion, it spurred the story forward with colorful and big words (enjoyable). An idealistic young American Italian searching for answers to her mistakes and a charitable purpose in life. How does a Philadelphia-born woman end up in a rural Italian town in the 1960's? Where finding a set of bones while setting up a toddler enrichment program in a village with no running water becomes more than a murder mystery? With lots of moving parts the lack of life skills, insecurities, old traditions, violent mafia-like control tactics, and ancient inbred misogyny in a place full of suspects, just remember, it's all about the journey

Francesca arrives in a remote and insular Italian village in 1960, sent to open a nursery school and teach hygiene and child care to the locals. It's unlike anywhere else she's ever been: there's no running water or electricity; medical care is hours away on foot; and everyone has secrets--about themselves and everyone else. It's a fraught climate of tacit blackmail, threats, dangerous politics, and missing people. When a body is discovered after a flood washes the post office away, a woman ask Francesca to find out if the skeleton is that of her son, missing for many years. It turns out that he's not the only missing person from the village, and Francesca's investigation deepens, upsetting the whole village. The novel is an excellent rendering of culture shock, the politics of mid-20th century Italy, the immigration pipeline to America, and other issues. The slow and careful development of characters meant that there was always a payoff on the way--especially when ti came to Francesca's own hidden past. While the ending didn't quite work for me, this is nonetheless a solid read.

Thank you @netgalley for the ARC of The Lost Boys of Santa Chiona. The premise seemed interesting to me, a mystery in Italy is right up mg alley. Unfortunately, the story didn’t from me. The writing was good, but it was missing the suspense.

Francesca is an American who moves to Italy in 1960 to start a nursery school. A flood unearths human remains and Francesca try’s to solve the mystery.