The Godmothers
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“A group of deeply complex and beautifully written women . . . Aubray marries history, suspense and womanhood in a story perfect for devouring.”—Newsweek
For readers of Naomi Krupitsky's The Family! An irresistible, suspenseful novel about four women who marry into an elegant, prosperous Italian family, and then must take charge of the family’s business when their husbands are forced to leave them during the war.
Meet the Godmothers: Filomena is a clever and resourceful war refugee with a childhood secret. Amie, a beautiful and dreamy French girl from upstate New York, escapes an abusive husband for a new life. Lucy, a tough-as-nails Irish lass, runs away from a strict girls’ home to become a nurse. And the glamorous Petrina, the family’s only daughter, graduates with honors from Barnard College despite a past trauma that nearly caused a family scandal.
All four women become godmothers to one another’s children, finding hope and shelter in this prosperous family and their sumptuous Greenwich Village home.
But the women’s secret pasts lead to unforeseen consequences and betrayals that threaten to unravel all their carefully laid plans. And when they must unexpectedly contend with notorious gangsters like Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano, the four Godmothers learn to put aside their differences so that they can work together to protect their loved ones and find their own unique paths to the futures they’ve always dreamed of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aubray (Cooking for Picasso) delivers an addictive and tense multigenerational feminist romp through WWII-era New York City, where a quartet of Italian sisters-in-law run a crime family. In 1980, 30-something narrator Nicole, whose precise placement in "the Godmothers'" family tree is only revealed in the final act, delves into whether her family has any secrets while her husband prepares to take a job in the Carter administration. This prompts the telling of "the whole story," taking the reader back to 1930s Italy and New York City, as chapters alternate between each of the godmothers of Nicole and her cousins. There's stylish, Barnard-educated Petrina; nurse Lucy; unstable Amie; and Filomena, who flees Naples under a false name in 1943. After the women marry into the crime family, their husbands go off to war and they take charge. In the ensuing decades, the family battles a rival crime organization, losing some members to murder, and one of the godmothers gets pregnant with another's husband's baby. The enormous cast and multiple complicated subplots are smoothly handled, with the tensions between the godmothers easily propelling the narrative. This credibly flips the script on male-dominated Mafia stories.