The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

By: Juliet  Grames
Location: FIC GRA
Genre: Historical Fiction, Italy

"This is the story of Mariastella Fortuna the Second, called Stella, formerly of Ievoli, a mountain village of Calabria, Italy, and lately of Connecticut, in the United States of America. Her life stretched over more than a century, and during that life she endured much bad luck and hardship. This is the story how she never died."

Hundred-year-old Stella Fortuna sits alone in her house in Wethersfield, Connecticut, crocheting blankets and angrily ignoring her sister, Tina, who lives across the street. The sisters, once the best of friends, have not spoken for thirty years, not since The Accident—the eighth time Stella nearly died.

But what unspeakable betrayal made Stella turn on her sister? Born in a mountaintop village in southern Italy, Stella and Tina had grown up in abject poverty in the years between the two World Wars, abandoned by their father, who had left to seek his fortune in L’America, and forced to drop out of school after first grade to work in the olive groves. Tough, vivacious, and fiercely loyal, the inseparable sisters were foils for each other, Stella precocious and charismatic, Tina obedient and hard-working. But as Stella suffered ever more serious near-death experiences—beginning in their childhood with the time she was burned by frying oil (“the eggplant attack”)—the girls’ beloved mother, Assunta, became convinced her eldest daughter was cursed, a victim of the Evil Eye or a malevolent ghost. But what was really trying to kill Stella Fortuna, eight (or maybe seven) different times?

"It’s one of those stories that as an emotional reader you’ll never let go.

The Seven Or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is a sprawling epic, an intuitive, nuanced expression of the female condition, of life battles won and lost, it is without doubt one of the best books I’ve read maybe even ever.

I hit every range of feeling possible at various points of reading this so therefore I have absolutely no choice but to highly recommend it. Beautiful, complex, heart breaking and real." Liz Goodreads