Christopher Castellani's third novel in his Maddalena trilogy, All This Talk of Love [Kindle], is a Ferro-Grumley finalist.
According to the Friends of South End Library, the book describes "the aging patriarch of an Italian-American immigrant family thinking about the haunting circumstances of his gay son’s death by suicide, decades before. The fourteen-year-old, Tony, had fallen in love with a waiter, Dante, at the family’s restaurant. The father found, and read, the teenager’s love poems, written on the back of the guest checks used for customers’ orders when working there after school. This was the 1960s. The waiter was fired. The son didn’t come home from school one day. His body was found in the river shortly after. The patriarch’s musings go from despair over prevailing social taboos at the time (..“common sense tells me this can’t be”..) to the horror of the AIDS epidemic since (..“when he feels–can he even admit it?–relieved, almost grateful, that Tony died when he did.”..) to the guilt he now can express (..“it was his own hand on his son’s back that night, pushing him off the bridge”..). Like the bridge itself, Antonio’s feelings span the time from those unforgiving days of the 1950s and 60s to this Christmas Eve almost 30 years later, when he is seventy-two. He believes his poem to Tony, if he could have written it, would have read “. .I want you back. Give me another chance..” Antonio even dares to think he “would have made peace with the truth about his son, as his own flesh and blood, the way other fathers have done.”
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