Most Precious Blood

by Vince Sgambati

Overview

Fans of Anne Tyler's quirky characters and her attention to family life, or Pete Hamill's depiction of diverse, ethnic, urban neighborhoods will connect to Most Precious Blood, set in the eleventh-hour of a declining Italian-American neighborhood where complex and often destructive loyalties have dire consequences. Hard Luck Lenny is the quintessential good son, brother, and father, and he fears a calamity will derail his son's future the way his own dreams were derailed years ago, but Frankie is preoccupied with thoughts of Gennaro DiCico, the son of a small-time mobster. Lenny's fears are realized when a cabdriver's son avenges his father's murder.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771833066
Publisher:	Guernica Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Series:	Guernica World Editions , #2
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Vince Sgambati's family owned and operated an Italian-American grocery store similar to Lasante's. Though a work of fiction, the soul of Most Precious Blood is drawn from Vince's experiences, and like most of Lenny Lasante's childhood friends and siblings, Vince moved on, but often returned to reclaim some lost flavor of ethnicity. His short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals and anthologies and have been recognized by the Nimrod Literary Awards: the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest (2013 & 2016). Most Precious Blood is his first novel. Vince makes his home in the Finger Lakes area of Central New York and in Manhattan.

Editorial Reviews

"Sgambati paints a vivid portrait of Italian-American life in present day Queens where the past weighs heavier than the present. At once tragic and redemptive, Most Precious Blood is essentially a story of the messy way love, community and family play out and the price we pay for connection." — Trebor Healey, Lambda award-winning author of A Horse Named Sorrow and Faun.

From the Publisher

★ 2019-12-20
Sgambati’s debut novel, set in New York City in the mid-2000s, celebrates a father’s fierce love for his son.

Lenny Lasante had been accepted to Columbia University, but when his father suddenly died, he dutifully took over the family’s market in Queens and his dad’s role in it. He’s now a hardworking single father who desperately hopes that his own son, Frankie, will have a better life and, above all, get out of the neighborhood. Lenny’s chief worry is Big Vinny DiCico, his childhood pal who’s now a mobster. Frankie’s best friend happens to be Vinny’s son, Gennaro; in fact, they’re lovers. The narrative kicks into high gear after someone kills Gennaro; he did so to get revenge on other members of the DiCico family, who’d killed his cabdriver father. Later, Lenny makes contact with Frankie’s mother, who’d abandoned them years ago, and Frankie becomes a writer. Sgambati is a debut novelist but a much-published short story writer who’s won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, among other awards, and his experience shows. The recurring motif of escape begins with the very first sentence, when snails—an Italian delicacy—try to sneak out of a sack in Lenny’s market; later in the book, Frankie sets them free. Dualities abound, contrasting Lenny and Big Vinny, Frankie and Gennaro, and Glenhaven in Queens and Taormina in Sicily. The past and present come poignantly alive in Frankie’s fevered dream—practically a prose poem—featuring him and Gennaro as young lovers a century ago. However, the prose isn’t all lyrical in style, as these lines delightfully testify: “Tootsie gave Mrs. Greco a puckered smile and a nod, as if she were forcing empathy through a sphincter.”

This book’s characters, and their neighborhood, will stay with readers long after they finish it.

Kirkus Reviews

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