The characters in Pigeon Soup & Other Stories are navigating relationships and grappling with issues of translocation, language and identity, religion and culture, and food. These tales portray the dark places they inhabit physically, emotionally, or metaphorically, with twists that sometimes provide a flicker or even a bright beam of hope.
"An exquisitely crafted, engaging and lively collection of novelle, Pigeon Soup & Other Stories, similarly to the sumptuous Mediterranean dishes seductively garnishing its pages, serves us a reading to be savoured, much like anything that is fine in life. Woven into a realist framework of old-country customs and new-world expectations, the narrative's interlacing strands of solid plot, sound psychological character study, and language and identity issues deploy an intense literary glow that caresses our sensibilities. Refreshingly innovative, too, the other side of the coin: the stories are not exclusive to one culture. And so, having enjoyed Nonna's "comforting bowl" of free-run unadulterated pigeon soup we find ourselves invited across the street (that is, across the page) to a "delicious bowl of Lipton's chicken soup." Ah, the joys of a pleasurable text, as Barthes would say."
Gabriel Niccoli, Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo. editor of Ricordi: Racconti di vite oltreoceano and Patterns of Nostos in Italian Canadian Narratives
