The Sicilian Inheritance, by Jo Piazza

Late one night when I couldn’t sleep and didn’t have anything new on my e-reader to distract me, I went on to my library’s Libby site looking for e-books that maybe weren’t on my “gotta read” list, but had the advantage of being immediately available and sounded like something I might enjoy. This was the first of them; after listening to the excellent podcast Wilder (about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Little House on the Prairie) which Jo Piazza was a co-creator of. This led to the Silician Inheritance podcast, in which Piazza tries to unravel the family mystery that serves as the basis for this novel. I listened to the first episode of that, thought it was interesting, but didn’t really get hooked, so didn’t pursue picking up the novel.

However, for a novel downloaded from the library at 3:00 am with the parameters “historical fiction” “women writers/characters” and “available NOW,” it was pretty good. The novel has a dual timeline, one strand telling the story of a Sicilian woman in the early 20th century who is left behind when her husband and sons move to America, and dies mysteriously before she can join them; the other thread is the story of the modern-day descendant who, facing shattering losses in her own life, goes to Sicily to explore a possible inheritance and ends up tangled both in solving a 100-year-old mystery and fighting modern-day organized crime. I liked what I learned about turn-of-the-century Sicily, which was the most interesting part of the novel.