The Infinite Now
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
On a rainy night in Philadelphia's Ninth Street Market, sixteen-year-old Fiora, newly-orphaned by the 1918 influenza epidemic, is dumped at an old man's door. Daughter of the local fortune teller, Fiora arrives with a little money, a lot of attitude, and her mother's formidable reputation. The old man, a widowed shoemaker ticking down his clock, is the only person in their superstitious immigrant community brave enough to stand between Fiora and an orphanage.
Fiora?s a modern, forward-thinking young woman, uninterested in using old-world magic to make a way for herself?but when her mother's magical curtain shows her that the old man will shortly die of a heart attack, Fiora panics, and casts her entire neighborhood into a stagnant bubble of time. A bubble where everything continues but nothing progresses?tomatoes won?t ripen, babies refuse to be born, and the sick suffer under the weight of a never-ending stream of unspent seconds. Not everything in the bubble is bad. Love, fresh and fascinating, ignites. Friendships take root. But as day drags into interminable day, the pressure inside the bubble world builds. Fiora must accept that not everything found can be kept, not everything saved will remain, and unless Fiora finds the courage to collapse the bubble, every one of her hopes will be trapped inside an unbearable, unyielding, unpredictable, and infinite Now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tarquini (Hindsight) attempts to evoke the horrors of the 1918 flu epidemic in this incoherent fantasy novel set in an Italian neighborhood in Philadelphia. Fiora Vicente loses both parents to the flu while her brothers are fighting in Europe; from her mother, a fortune teller, she inherits a window curtain that can predict or possibly manipulate the future. Fiora tries to use the curtain to do things like keeping her elderly guardian from having a heart attack, but its magic resists her, and the guaritrice, the local folk healer from their village back in Italy, does nasty things like charming away Fiora's memories with herbs snuck into her tea. The neighborhood and time period are worth exploring, and the looming shadows of the war and the flu make some impression, but Fiora's motivations, goals, and general character are not drawn well enough for the emotional arc of the book to make any sense. The plot flounders because the few character motivations that are comprehensible are clich d, such as the way circumstances keep throwing Fiora together with an obvious love interest, and readers never understand enough about the way the curtain interacts with time to warrant the emotional weight the book places on it.