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• Edgar and Lucy St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2017
• Honey HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2024

1. Honey : a novel LCCN 2023934679 Type of material Book Personal name Lodato, Victor, author. Main title Honey : a novel / Victor Lodato, Millicent Bennett. Edition First. Published/Produced New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 2024. Projected pub date 2404 Description pages cm ISBN 9780063309616 (hardcover) 9780063309630 (paperback) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Edgar and Lucy LCCN 2016044041 Type of material Book Personal name Lodato, Victor, author. Main title Edgar and Lucy / Victor Lodato. Edition First U.S. Edition. Published/Produced New York : St. Martin's Press, 2017. Description 533 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9781250096982 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3612.O33 E34 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE LC CATALOG

• Victor Lodato website - https://victorlodato.com/html/about.html

  Victor Lodato is the author of two critically acclaimed novels. Edgar and Lucy was called "a riveting and exuberant ride" by the New York Times, and Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award, was hailed as "a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel." Mathilda Savitch, a "Best Book of the Year" according to The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail, won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and has been published in sixteen countries.

  Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.

  Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Victor Lodato

  Genres: Literary Fiction

  New and upcoming books
  April 2024

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  Honey

  Novels
  Mathilda Savitch (2009)
  Edgar and Lucy (2017)
  Honey (2024)
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  Collections
  Six Shorts 2017 (2017) (with others)
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  Plays hide
  Motherhouse (2010)
  Arlington (2015)
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• Huffington Post - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/victor-lodato-on-edgar-and-lucy-a-novel-ten-years_b_5908c2f9e4b084f59b49fd31

  Victor Lodato on 'Edgar and Lucy,' a Novel Ten Years in the Making
  Victor Lodato on 'Edgar and Lucy,' a Novel Ten Years in the Making
  Mara White
  By
  Mara White, Contributor
  Avid reader, smut writer, former dancer, New Yorker and mother of two.
  May 2, 2017, 02:00 PM EDT
  This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

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  Victor Lodato is an award winning playwright and author of the novel “Matilda Savitch.” His latest work, “Edgar and Lucy,” was recently released to much critical acclaim and took him almost a decade to craft. “Edgar and Lucy,” is a five hundred page novel that explores the love, secrets and ghosts of one extraordinary New Jersey family. His work has been published in The New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta as well as Best American Short Stories. Lodato, originally from Hoboken, New Jersey, now divides his time between Arizona and Oregon.

  MW: Edgar and Lucy was a nine-year project for you. Did you work on it solidly throughout or was it a book you abandoned and kept coming back to? How have you changed in those nine years since you began the story?

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  VL: This book was more of a ten-year project. I actually started it before my first novel Mathilda Savitch, but didn’t feel smart enough—or perhaps brave enough—to write it at that point in my life. Edgar and Lucy was an incredibly difficult undertaking, physically and emotionally, and so I did work on other things while taking breaks from it: short stories and plays (I’m also a playwright). It felt kind of crazy to spend so much time working on a single project. But I became so deeply involved with the characters that I couldn’t abandon them. And I think that writing this book did change me. Edgar, the eight-year-old in the novel, has this uncanny ability to love ferociously and to offer kindness in the most unlikely situations, and to offer it to people who don’t seem to deserve it. While working on Edgar and Lucy, I realized how strangely rare real kindness is, when it’s the simplest thing and should be so easy to offer. And now that I’ve woken up from a ten-year dream of writing this book into a world in which there is suddenly so much unkindness, I feel good about putting this story into the world right now.

  MW: You call this book a New Jersey gothic novel, which I adore—then at the NYC reading you elaborated with other descriptors like, love story, thriller, even melodrama. I’m sure readers will decide for themselves what category the book belongs in, but what do these labels and terms mean to you?

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  VL: Well, the book is sort of a mirror-land of my own childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, and of my hot-blooded, working-class Italian-Polish family. And I do think the novel is a true gothic, in that it’s about Edgar and Lucy’s complicated connection to the past, and there’s definitely a sense of the past as a source of malignant influence. And of course much of this happens in an updated version of the ruined castle, which is the dilapidated cabin in the Pine Barrens, certainly a haunted place. Allowing myself to think of the book as a gothic gave me permission to go with a more heightened kind of storytelling—which felt right for Edgar and Lucy. The emotional temperature of the book is hotter than anything I’ve ever written; the emotions are bigger, balder, crazier. And though there was a certain point when I felt embarrassed to be writing in such a way, I knew that in order to be true to this story and these characters, I had to dive into the water and go for the big opera of it.

  MW: It seems like humor and the absurd play a crucial role in crafting characters with questionable morality. Can you tell us about your process in creating characters who walk the line between good and bad?

  VL: Since I always write from inside my characters, I tend not to judge them. I can’t imagine writing a novel without loving the characters. Perhaps it’s the writing itself that makes me come to love them. I think that’s why fiction, both the writing of it and the reading of it, is such a civilizing thing. In it, there’s the possibility of learning to love people who are nothing like you—and that’s where the miracle of art happens, and you change. As for the humor: that just comes naturally to me. I can’t imagine telling any story, no matter how painful, without some comedy. Plus, I’m from New Jersey. We find comedy in everything.

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  MW: should probably mention that Edgar and Lucy are mother and son, so that readers aren’t expecting to walk into a Gothic romance. Parent-child relationships and relationships with elders are important thematically in your work and seem to create a common thread throughout your oeuvre. Why are these relationships important to you? Can you tell us about writing from the point of view of a child and how you access that internal voice?

  VL: I grew up in a house with both my grandmothers, whom I adored. The character of Florence is basically a combination of these two women—as if I’d stuffed my tiny polish grandmother inside the larger body of my Italian nonna. As for writing in the voice of a child: I find it liberating to write from the perspective of someone who is still learning the world and interpreting its complexities for the first time. It enables me to address my own fears and anxieties and longings in a very open and innocent way. I don’t have to pretend to have all the answers.

  MW: What’s next for you after the book tour? Have you already started working on your next project?

  VL: I’m working on a collection of short stories. My most recent story, “Herman Melville, Volume 1,” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/herman-melville-volume-i was published last month in The New Yorker. I’m also branching out into non-fiction—personal essays like the one published earlier this year in The New York Times “Modern Love” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/style/modern-love-when-your-greatest-romance-is-friendship.html?_r=0 column. Love and kindness—they’re very much on my mind, these days.

  You can read more about Victor and his work on his Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Victor-Lodato/e/B0024JESA8 or his website: http://victorlodato.com

  *A version of this interview appeared earlier in the New York Daily News.

• Literary Ashland - https://literaryashland.org/?p=10054

  An Interview with Victor Lodato
  Posted on March 7, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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  Victor Lodato is a novelist, playwright, and poet. His first novel, Mathilda Savitch, was called “a Salingeresque wonder” by The New York Times and was on the “Best Book” lists of The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail. Mathilda Savitch won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize.

  Victor’s second novel, Edgar and Lucy, was published this week (St. Martin’s Press). Lena Dunham calls Edgar and Lucy “profoundly spiritual and hilariously specific” and Sophie McManus lauds the “tender, funny, living immediacy of its characters.”

  Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation in France, and The Bogliasco Foundation in Italy.

  His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. A recent essay was published in the “Modern Love” column at The New York Times.

  Originally from New Jersey, Victor lives in Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

  EB: Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you find your way to writing?

  VL: As a kid, growing up in New Jersey, in a working-class Italian-Polish family, I was the odd duck, writing poetry and melodramatic skits that I begged my older jock brother to perform with me. When I went to college (the first person in my family to do so), I entered a fine arts program, to study acting. After college, I was an actor for years. Often, though, I found myself being cast in plays that I didn’t really care for (for instance, a stint as Nicky the warlock in a revival of the 1950s Bell, Book, and Candle). Eventually, I decided to try my hand at writing some one-character plays for myself. Over a six-year period, I wrote and performed seven one-man plays, supported in part by a Solo Theater Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was a busy and intense time, but, ultimately, I burned myself out. I’m basically an introvert, fairly shy, and after years of doing these shows, I realized that I felt much more myself when I was writing the pieces, rather than performing them. I stopped acting and became a playwright—and then, twelve or so years ago, I switched paths again. I wrote my first novel—Mathilda Savitch—which was published in 2009.

  In regard to the multiple genres I’ve worked in, I used to feel that it was the moody, somewhat depressed Polish boy in me that wrote the poems, and then the more hot-blooded Italian boy that wrote the plays. But, in writing fiction, I feel like those two sides of me collaborate. Fiction seems to allow me to incorporate the various aspects of my nature into a single undertaking.

  EB: I was really captivated by your first book, Mathilda Savitch, and by the wild combination of world-weariness and innocence that the title character brought to the narration. How did you capture such a voice?

  VL: Mathilda’s voice just arrived in my head one morning with incredible force and clarity. And though the first words seemed a bit ominous (I want to be awful. I want to do awful things), I knew that they weren’t coming from someone evil, but rather from a child—a willful adolescent refusing to be contained. I really can’t begin any piece of writing without this deep connection to a voice. With Mathilda, I felt from the start that I knew her in my body, in my breath. Where such voices come from is one of the mysteries of the writing process, and one that I tend not to question.

  EB: In some way that book seemed to be an allegory of the experience that young people—and all of us—had with terrorism. Is that part of what you had in mind?

  VL: I started to write Mathilda Savitch in September of 2002, almost exactly one year after 9/11. The first few months of writing, I wasn’t thinking—at least not consciously—about terrorism or tragedy or grief. I didn’t know what the story was. I was simply following the voice of this young girl, who at that point was still a stranger to me. Over time, though, I began to see that Mathilda and I had a lot in common. Whereas I began the novel one year after 9/11, the story of the book begins one year after the death of Mathildaʼs beloved older sister, Helene. Terrorism hovers in the background of Mathildaʼs world, as well, and I can see now that by borrowing this child’s voice, I was able to address my own fear and confusion and sadness about 9/11 in a very open and innocent way. It was liberating to write in the voice of a child, from the perspective of someone who is still learning the world and interpreting its complexities for the first time. I think, in some ways, grief turns everyone into children: innocents standing before the incomprehensible.

  EB: In Edgar and Lucy, your new novel, you tell the story of death and tragedy in an Italian-American family in New Jersey and young Edgar’s surreal path out of childhood. This seems to be a novel about what is real and true, and in which none of the characters are clear-cut. As a writer, you seem to be pushing us out of our comfort zone but holding our interest at the same time. What’s the key to that balance? For me it was in the small, familiar details of description.

  VL: You always want there to be some kind of suspense in regard to what will happen next, or even in regard to understanding the motives or morality of the characters. I think at the core of all writing and reading is mystery—the ultimate mystery being, who are other people? One writes—and reads—in an attempt to answer this question, or at least to get closer to an answer.

  Ultimately, I want to write stories that have transformative power—for the reader, for the characters, for myself. I guess I’m a romantic in that I want to read and write books that will change me, change my life. I like books that are grounded in emotional truth, but that can also feel mythic. Of course, I never think about myth at the front of my brain while writing. It’s more something I feel in my gut—a sort of physical sensation, a sense that this story is a matter of life and death. In Edgar and Lucy, the hero of the story is really Edgar. And his power isn’t physical strength or even overt bravery, but rather this sort of uncanny ability to love ferociously and to offer kindness in the most unlikely situations, and to offer it to people who don’t seem to deserve it. It’s funny, writing this book I realized how strangely rare real kindness is, when it’s the simplest thing in the world and should be so easy to offer. And I guess if I’ve woken up from a ten-year dream of writing this book into a world in which there is suddenly so much unkindness, then I feel good about putting this love story into the world at this particular moment. Because, ultimately, that’s how I see this book—as a love story. And not just one story, but a number of love stories that are all connected to each other. It took everything I had in me to write this book. I don’t take fiction writing lightly. I really do believe that fiction, both the writing of it and the reading of it, is a very civilizing thing. In it, there’s the possibility of learning to love people who are nothing like you—and that’s where the miracle of art happens, and you change.

  EB: I wondered if the crispness of the characters in your novels—Edgar, Lucy, Mathilda—comes from your being a playwright. How do you see the two styles of writing as coming together in your work? Was it difficult to write a longer piece or did you find that freeing?

  VL: Certainly, writing from voice and character is an extension of my work in the theater. When I write, I actively feel myself taking on the characters, performing them, really, while I work. I never write without talking to myself, without speaking the words out loud as I put them down.

  I guess one could say that the medium of theater is fate, while the medium of fiction is memory. I try to bring into my fiction some of the danger of theater, to create narratives that, even as they describe the past, are somehow infused with a present-tense theatricality that raises the stakes of the emotional transactions.

  One of the things that I love about writing novels is the freedom to let the story unfold over a greater length of time. In a play, the magic circle drawn around the characters has to be much tighter. When crafting a play, I invariably find that I write more scenes than I can actually use. In a play, too much extra material, too many diversions, can be fatal, especially if these things impede the sense of inevitability, the sense that we are witnessing characters caught in the wheels of fate. And while a novel’s power can be reduced by excess baggage, as well (and, in writing mine, I do think I apply my playwright’s habit of precision), the form is clearly a roomier one—one that allows the characters to have a few more detours of thought and situation. And, having fallen so deeply in love with Edgar and Lucy and Mathilda, I thoroughly enjoyed being able to give them a more generous life.

  EB: I was struck by an early scene in the book where Edgar’s teacher is encouraging students to draw bananas and wine glasses, but Edgar wants to doodle instead. Does writing have a doodling aspect to it?

  VL: I love this question. As Edgar says: drawing is when you have to make a picture of something that’s in front of you; doodling is when you just make stuff up. And writing, for me, is much more like doodling—at least in the beginning. I never work with a plan or an outline. For me, a first sentence is often like a crazy blob of paint that my subconscious throws down on the page—and then I work from there toward a greater understanding of the picture. Often, the first few paragraphs are a kind of free association—which I follow in an attempt to discover what’s really on my mind. I like to stay dumb as a writer, especially in the early stages of creating a story. I’ll trip myself up if I try to control things, or pretend that I know more that I really do.

  EB: As a linguist, I feel compelled to ask about the names of your characters: Edgar and Lucy Fini, Mathilda and Helene Savitch. These are not your usual Ashleys and Michaels. What’s the role of characters’ names in fiction?

  VL: To be honest, I usually just stick with the first name that pops into my head for a character. Only rarely do I question this impulse and change the name. Edgar was born to me as Edgar—the same for Lucy, the same for Mathilda. Even if a name seems a bit odd, I just go with it. And then of course sometimes the name leads me to understand more about the character later. When I landed on the name Edgar, it made me question who had given him this name—a question that ended up revealing some things to me about his father. Also, the name Edgar seemed sort of “gothic”—and maybe that encouraged me to lean into some of the more gothic elements of the story.

  I do think, in many ways, that this book is a true gothic, in that it’s about Edgar and Lucy’s complicated connection to the past, and there’s definitely a sense of the past as a source of malignant influence. And of course all of this is happening in an updated version of the ruined castle, which is the dilapidated Fini house, certainly a haunted place. While working on this novel, I sometimes imagined a playful subtitle: Edgar and Lucy, A New Jersey Gothic—and this actually gave me permission to go with a more heightened kind of storytelling, and not to be afraid of the emotional temperature of the book—which gets pretty hot, at times. I was often sitting at my desk, shouting or laughing or crying. I can only imagine what my neighbors must think.

  EB: Thanks for talking with us.

  VL: Thank you, Ed, for asking such good questions!

• Amazon -

  About the author
  Victor Lodato is the author of two critically acclaimed novels. EDGAR AND LUCY was called “a riveting and exuberant ride” by the New York Times, and MATHILDA SAVITCH, winner of the PEN USA Award, was hailed as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel.” MATHILDA SAVITCH, a "Best Book of the Year" according to The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail, won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and has been published in sixteen countries.

  Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.

  Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

  Website: victorlodato.com

  Instagram: Given_Name_Vittorio

• United Agents - https://www.unitedagents.co.uk/victor-lodato-0

  Victor Lodato
  On behalf of The Clegg Agency

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  Photograph: François Robert

  www.victorlodato.com
  Books
  Agent: Anna Webber
  Anna Webber
  awebber@unitedagents.co.uk
  Associate: Seren Adams
  sadams@unitedagents.co.uk
  Books
  Download CV
  Victor Lodato is a playwright, poet, and novelist. MATHILDA SAVITCH, his debut, was hailed by The New York Times as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel” and was deemed a “Best Book of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail. The novel won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and has been published in sixteen countries. Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He was born and raised in New Jersey, and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

  Victor's new novel, EDGAR & LUCY, was published by Head of Zeus in 2018.

  Victor was longlisted for The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award 2020, having twice been shortlisted in previous years.

  His latest novel, HONEY, will be published by Harper in the US in April 2024.

Edgar & Lucy.

By Victor Lodato.

Mar. 2017. 544p. St. Martin's, $27.99 (9781250096982); e-book, $14.99 (9781250097002).

Edgar Fini is an unusual eight-year-old, marked by albinism, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and weird predilections. An accident claimed the life of his father while Edgar was a baby, and his doting grandmother and immature mother keep the incident shrouded in mystery. The constant fighting between these two important figures creates a troubled home for Edgar, until his beloved grandmother dies unexpectedly. When his mother, Lucy, seems too busy with booze and a new boyfriend to notice his unbearable grief, a stranger in a truck is suddenly there to offer the solace Edgar craves. As Lodato, author of the highly acclaimed Mathilda Savitch (2009), opens up his characters' pasts, Lucy's absence becomes more sympathetic in light of her own traumatic history and the weight of the illness and death of Edgars father. The passing of her mother-in-law hits her harder than she anticipates, but it isn't until Edgar goes missing that Lucy truly hits rock bottom. From there, with the help of the new man in her life, maybe she can crawl back up before it's too late. Through numerous changing viewpoints, the truth is gradually revealed, creating suspense and rewarding readers with unexpected parallels and touching connections. Lodato's remarkable novel traces a broken family's spiritual journey toward healing in moving, magical prose. --Cortney Ophoff

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: a 125,000 print run, a national author tour, and a major marketing campaign ensure reader excitement for this rising literary star.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hays, Carl. "Edgar & Lucy." Booklist, vol. 113, no. 8, 15 Dec. 2016, pp. 18+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A476563441/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7e45537. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Lodato, Victor EDGAR & LUCY St. Martin's (Adult Fiction) $27.99 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-250-09698-2

The life of a young albino boy in suburban New Jersey is permanently marked by two tragedies, neither of his making.Playwright and novelist Lodato's debut novel (Mathilda Savitch, 2009) was a sublime coming-of-age story about a young girl. In his ambitious but less focused follow-up, the author switches genders to focus on the life-changing events that shape an 8-year-old boy. It's a dark mirror of Lodato's debut, filled with menace and grief that takes no less than seven weighty passages to play out. The child is Edgar Allan Fini, who has "pale skin, white hair, tired eyes a sea-glass shade of green." To his mother, Lucy, an alcoholic hair stylist, he's "her funny little albino fruitcake." But as Lodato starts building out Lucy and Edgar's world with meticulous detail, he's also lacing the tale with ill intent. First there is the matter of Frank Fini, Edgar's manic-depressive father, who committed suicide by plunging his car off a cliff, nearly taking Lucy with him. There's Edgar's grandmother Florence, who wields such influence over the boy that she continues to muse over his fate even after her death. We have the butcher with whom Lucy is sleeping, who accidentally severs Edgar's finger. Lucy herself is still shattered by Frank's death, to the degree that she tells her lover "please don't be happy" when she finds herself pregnant. It's a dark tale told in stolen moments and silent reflections, and it gets darker as time passes. The final half of the book depicts the strange relationship between Edgar and a man named Conrad who committed a terrible trespass against his own son. These characters hurtle toward a climax that begins to defy plausibility--the author ties things up with a jarring change in voice at the end--but readers who make it that far are apt to be enraptured already. A domestic fable about grief and redemption likely to leave readers emotionally threadbare.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Lodato, Victor: EDGAR & LUCY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A475357456/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ccab262. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Edgar and Lucy

Victor Lodato. St. Martin's, $27.99 (544p)

ISBN 978-1-250-09698-2

The sprawling second novel by the author of Mathilda Savitch zooms in on its two title characters to the near-exclusion of everything else. Edgar is eight when the novel opens. Albino and borderline autistic, he's having a hard time making it in urban New Jersey, and he finds himself tempted to take the protection offered by a mysterious bearded middle-aged man who is often found patrolling his neighborhood in a pickup truck. Edgar's widowed mother, Lucy, does her best to care for him, but she's still haunted by her dead husband and chafing under the household rule of her stern Italian mother-in-law, with whom she and Edgar live. The novel has the plot of a much briefer book, and, while some readers may revel in its rich description, others will find it self-indulgent. Secondary characters come across as more quirky than credible, and the introduction of the point of view of a ghostly character disrupts the flow of the narrative. Scenes set in the deserted woods of the New Jersey Pine Barrens have an eerie power, as do flashbacks to the early years of Lucy's marriage. While the plot is suspenseful enough to keep the pages turning, Lovado blunts the edges of difficult subjects such as suicide and child endangerment, making for an emotionally easier story. 725,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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"Edgar and Lucy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 5, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 176. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A480195158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ad599691. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Lodato, Victor. Honey. Harper. Apr. 2024. 400p. ISBN 9780063309616. $32. F

At 11, Honey saw her father strangle a man in their backyard. Her brother helped bury the man's body. At 15, when Richie Verona raped her, her father found out and made her ride with them to an isolated New Jersey beach where he killed and disposed of Richie. Honey didn't know it then, but she was pregnant. After college, she left her family, never looking back. Subsequent decades in the art auction business gave her culture, a spell as mistress to a much older man, and a lot of money. Eighty-two now but not looking or feeling her age, she has returned home to sort out her life. She doesn't need them, but complications come anyway. With them also comes reassessment, especially regarding how she feels about her still toxic family. Unintended attachments come too: a love affair with a young painter; a neighbor who's needy for love and can't leave her abusive boyfriend; a hunt for a lost great-nephew who's transitioning and has been roughed up by his father and kicked out of the family. At the tail end of a life spent hiding from commitment. Honey finally lets love in. VERDICT Lodato (Mathilda Savitch) has written a stunning novel that begs for readers.--David Keymer

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Keymer, David. "Honey." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 3, Mar. 2024, pp. 104+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786321568/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9905f387. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Lodato, Victor HONEY Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $32.00 4, 16 ISBN: 9780063309616

A mobster's daughter has finally returned, in her 80s, to the family's New Jersey home, and she knows where the bodies are buried--literally.

Honey Fasinga, originally Ilaria Fazzinga, has spent a lifetime distancing herself from her Italian roots. To dodge expectations and bury memories of the brutalities she witnessed while living under the roof of her father, the Great Pietro--whom she loved, hated, and feared--she went to college, studied art, and spent decades living in Los Angeles, working at a prestigious auction house. But now she's back with a sense of unfinished business, reconnecting, remembering, and trying to resolve the gap between her assured adult self and her violent childhood. Lodato's new novel circles Honey ceaselessly, resurrecting people and events (some horrible) from her past while introducing new characters to challenge who she is now. Irrepressible neighbor Joss is grappling with Lee, a rough boyfriend. Gentle artist Nathan is attracted to Honey despite their half-century age difference. And what about Honey herself? Feisty, finely dressed, and fond of a drink, she is also suicidal and prone to panic attacks, an uneasy, unlikely meld of arrogance and uncertainty. As she swings between opinions and options, death visits the narrative repeatedly, and so do beatings, notably of Lee and also of Honey's grandnephew Michael, whose exploration of gender sits badly with the Fazzingas' "traditional" values, furthering Honey's sense of distaste and alienation. This nature/nurture debate is the central feature of a story that is long and loose, driven less by plot than by the tireless recording of Honey's ups and downs involving fine art, elderly indulgences, relationship choices, and a gun. This entertaining, Sopranos-esque mix doesn't entirely gel, but for all the vacillating, the book does establish one inescapable fact: Honey is family.

Something of a jumble, this leisurely, tough/tender saga of homecoming exudes warmth and brio.

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"Lodato, Victor: HONEY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784238499/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=96c5ef05. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Hays, Carl. "Edgar & Lucy." Booklist, vol. 113, no. 8, 15 Dec. 2016, pp. 18+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A476563441/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7e45537. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024. "Lodato, Victor: EDGAR & LUCY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A475357456/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ccab262. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024. "Edgar and Lucy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 5, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 176. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A480195158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ad599691. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024. Keymer, David. "Honey." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 3, Mar. 2024, pp. 104+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786321568/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9905f387. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024. "Lodato, Victor: HONEY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784238499/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=96c5ef05. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

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