“A captivating tale about the trials of settling down, fitting in and battling on amid emotional upheaval.”
“I was the arminuta, the one who was returned.” So says the narrator of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s third novel (entitled “L’Arminuta” in Italy), her first published in English. The return—or the “transfer” as one character terms it—takes place one afternoon in August 1975. An unnamed 13-year-old girl is wrenched from the people she assumed were her parents and deposited with a group of unfriendly strangers who, she is told, are her birth family. What follows is a captivating tale about the trials of settling down, fitting in and battling on amid emotional upheaval.
