afraehlich 's review for:

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames

3.0

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Couldn’t decide between giving this three or four stars. My interest was captured at the beginning between wanting to know about the various deaths of Stella and what caused her to turn on her sister after the accident, but at the end of the book I was left feeling a bit disappointed and not particularly liking any of the characters. I enjoyed the perspective of growing up in a small village in southern Italy and the journey of immigration to America. The book also really makes you think about what being a female has meant for probably a majority of women throughout history— obedience to husbands and fathers, marriage and motherhood whether you wanted it or not. However, I didn’t end up feeling particularly convinced of why Stella would end up hating Tina. While Tina was not my favorite character, I don’t think it would really be fair to blame her for any of the things that happened to Stella. Also, while I felt bad for Stella, I wasn’t really convinced of why she would become an alcoholic or seem to be so uncaring about her children when she had seemed to warm to the idea of motherhood once becoming pregnant. Don’t get me wrong, spending all that time pregnant and trying to control 10 children after never wanting any of that in the first place would be awful. But she also had a husband who worked three jobs and did all the cooking, plus the help of her sister and mother in raising her children. I think the author could have made me feel more in touch with the character and her depression by having her forced to become the cook for her family and taken away from her mother prematurely rather than when she died. Also, while it was clear that Stella did not want marriage or children, it wasn’t really clear what she did want. If she had a more concrete dream for an alternative life that again would have helped me feel more sympathetic to her character. To be fair I think she enjoyed working and she did have her idea of running away but while she would have been happy to be away from her father would she really have been okay being away from her mother at that point when it sent her spiraling all those years later? I know this wasn’t what the author was going for but I feel like it would’ve been a more satisfying conclusion to have had Tina really be more culpable in many of the near-deaths and things that went wrong in Stella‘s life. Perhaps following her lobotomy Stella would have realized that rather than the hand of a ghost it was Tina‘s hand causing her to be her various accidents. Along with that it would have been quite satisfying to have it be timid Tina who killed her father in the end after realizing what a horrible man he was when Stella told her about what she had found him doing with his nieces. If this would have been the case I would have both understood Stella‘s new hatred for her sister while also somehow being more sympathetic toward Tina in the end.