First of all, ignore the part about passion and forgiveness. Those parts are made up. The actual story is only about murder and family, which would be enough if it were well written. But it isn't. Maybe she was padding out the book, to make it long enough for her book contract? I'm only guessing.

But guessing is what Stapinski does throughout the book, and she doesn't tell so. She writes about people long dead, about whom she knows very little, going on and on about their thoughts, their emotions (as in the title) about their motives, all things she has no way of knowing. They were in love, or angry, or rebellious, afraid, or vengeful. She doesn't know. If she had written, "maybe" before she went into chapter upon chapter of made up stuff, maybe it would have been tolerable.
But I felt deceived (and bored) as I was reading.

She also gives background to the history and culture of the area, things that are interesting, but that often have little to do with the story. Setting the scene is a good thing, but overdoing it is distracting. As is peppering the narrative with Italian words. There is one character who became the lover of a wealthy, married landowner who set her up in her own home and fathered some of her children. She refers to her as a concubine. For me, that brought up images of the East, or North Africa, not Italy. A woman like that is someone's mistress.

Maybe what bugged me the most was Stapinski's going on and on about how criminality can be passed down through genes -- that it's in a person's DNA. Ostensibly, this is why she went on her quest -- to protect her children from that horrible gene. But I ask myself, finding out more about the murderer and the crime, that would protect her children from becoming criminals? How? Why not just say she was curious? or even obsessed? Wouldn't that have been enough of a motive to pursue the truth about one's great great grandmother? No. It would not have filled up one or two chapters. I felt, while reading, that Shapinsky had been paid by the page and that I was the victim of that arrangement.

The story of the murder was interesting and would have come over much better if all the filler and chaff had been removed, leaving a much shorter story. ( )

A reconstructed history driven by the author's desire to verify the story she's heard of her great-great-great grandmother.

Very well written, centuries of peasants dominated and exploited by "the North" Italians and others plays out through generations and factors in to the huge migration of Southern Italians to the United States. A combination of deep and meticulous research, it would be of particular interest to those of Southern Italian heritage (given the detailed history of the area presented), and historical (non)fiction fans.

It could also function as an ad hoc local tourist guidebook of the area; or if one prefers to "cut to the chase" after the first few chapters, go to chapter 28 and continue reading. ( )

I really enjoyed this book - I have read several others by Ms Stapinski, in particular I enjoyed Five-Finger Discount, which I thought was hilarious, so reading this was pretty automatic (although I admit, it sat on the shelf for a while awaiting its turn). It didn't quite have the inner reveal that Five Finger did, so that is why I gave it four stars, but still. I could relate to the whispered stories of her family members and I applaud her efforts to uncover the truth, no matter where that took her. Her descriptions are vivid and spot on. If you have an interest in Italian American history, add this one to your reading list. Good story well told - the kind of book I didn't want to finish too soon, if you know what I mean ( )

Thank you so much for choosing me as a winner in the giveaway !

I absolutely loved this book, and loved it even more because it was not written by a historian. We could not manage without historians but sometimes their books are as dry as toast. Reading this book was like sitting on a sofa with your bestie listening to exciting and fascinating stories and mysteries.

I am afraid I had to knock off a star because I hate it when authors make true stories sound like novels. If you don't know something for a fact or have a photo, letter or diary, I don't like when they add all their own dialogue or make references to 'her thin hands', ' thin knotty hair ', etc. I like history that is light and easy to read as this one was, but could do without all the assumption and writing paragraphs based on how you think the person thought, spoke, wrote or acted without any proof.

That is my own pet peeve - others may or may not agree with me.
Other than that this book was a gem and I highly recommend it especially for those with an interest in the horrors experienced by many immigrants.
( )

Helene Stapinski's strong narrative voice drew me into this book, but ultimately Murder in Matera failure to decide what kind of book it wanted to be failed to keep me gripped until the end. Is this a work of history? A piece of historical fiction based on a true story? A meditation on immigration and familial identity? A travelogue? Stapinski makes feints in all these directions and more, as she explores the life of her great-great-grandmother, Vita Gallitelli, whose immigration to the US in the 1890s supposedly came hot on the heels of her having murdered someone. Stapinski travels to Italy to research Vita's story, passed down through her New Jersey Italian family for generations, to find out what really happened and to "solve" the murder.

Now, if she'd really bothered to sit down with a historian or genealogist before she undertook this, Stapinski would have been, 1. Swiftly disabused of the notion that you can find out what "really" happened at a remove of more than a century, 2. Told she couldn't base part of her argument for what "really happened" on customs like prima notte because that's myth, not fact, and 3. Not been able to talk about her "decade-long search for the truth" because she would have been pointed quickly and efficiently towards the neatly-organised archives where birth, death, and marriage certificates, and records of criminal trials, were all indexed and waiting for her to just request the right file. Yet one gets the feeling that Stapinski deliberately postpones those parts of her narrative, because it's not as thrilling as her going to caves once inhabited by medieval hermits and declaring that the scriptural scenes painted on the cave walls provided clues to help her figure out what really happened.

(I don't know if that was the part of the book that frustrated me the most, or if it was Stapinski's declaration that finding out that great-great-grandmother Vita wasn't really a murder relieved her of her fears that her children might have inherited unusually violent genetic tendencies. No, instead now it's just her grandfather who was a life-long criminal and murderer! Plus all the other petty crooks in the family! To make it clear, I don't think that any of those things are going to have an impact on Stapinski's children either: just pointing out the sheer illogic of her train of thought, something which she apparently never realises. Instead, she ends up hailing her great-great-grandmother for her moxie and foresight in emigrating to the US, an act which Stapinski directly credits with allowing her to have a "blessed life", skipping over, well, all the generations of struggle, poverty, and criminality in between.)

If Murder in Matera had been edited down to a longer piece in the New Yorker or a similar magazine, it might have worked. Stapinski would have been forced to edit out some of her conjecture and more melodramatic sorties, or the swathes of material that seem to have been pulled at random from Wikipedia. (Part of the story hinges on pears. Did we need a whole section on pears in history, literature, and myth from places as far afield as China? No.) ( )