Book Review: The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia

Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.

Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When the local priest's housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames will be published July 23, 2024. Knopf books provided an early galley for review.

Back at PLA in April of this year, I attended a panel where Grames talked about this novel. Having family myself that can be traced back to Italy, I thought it might be an interesting book to check out.

I have to admit that historical fiction set in other countries is not my usual choice. Add to that the Italian names of the villagers all tend to blur for me. So, it was a bit slower for me to get into this one. After getting through the first section of four (a bit more than a quarter of the way through), I decided to put this one aside and attempt to get back into it down the road when I can better focus on it.

I do have to say, however, that Grames uses her words to really paint the setting of Santa Chionia well. And this insular community setting presents a great challenge to Francesca's gathering of clues to solve a decades old mystery.