Lives of the Saints

Lives of the Saints took me on a roller-coaster. The writing is well-done, but the content wasn’t always my style. I went between not being able to get enough, to skimming pages. Lives of the Saints is the award-winning book set in Italy in the 1960s. It is about a seven-year-old boy named Vittorio Innocente and his mother, Cristina. One day Vittorio sees a snake slithering away from his mother. After a stay in the hospital, she is shunned by the village people and grandfather. In their culture, superstition reigns strong, so Vittorio must live with a depressed and angry mother, a grandfather who is never around anymore, and schoolmates who bully him for unknown reasons. Vittorio endures many hardships throughout the story, yet leaves readers wondering what is to become of him later in his life.

I had trouble following the context of the story; it sounded like they lived in times before the 1960s. The situations that Vittorio found himself involved in were astonishing and difficult to imagine. Overall, I enjoyed the book and believe that having been written in the 1990s, it is still relevant today.