Very intriguing to watch the back and forth on two sides of the ocean concerning the bone marrow donation and all that it entailed for the families involved in so many directions! I guess the store is headed toward a happy ending, of sorts, in the end, but I was (possible spoiler alert here!!) a little disappointed in the eventual relationship between the cousins.... Beautifully written when it came to the medical descriptions and yes, Nina's birthmark. ( )

This was a very enjoyable 'feel good' book. "magnificent dappled sea' of the title is how our bone marrow is described. A young Catholic boy in Italy is entered into a bone marrow donor list after he is diagnosed with leukemia. The matching donor is a Jewish rabbi in New York City. And the tangled threads of the history of the families begin to unravel and re-thread themselves. ( )

This story follows the life of a young Italian Catholic boy, Luca Taviano, who at the tender age of ten, is struck with leukemia. The only thing that will save him is a new technology, a bone marrow transplant. Thanks to his pseudo Mom, a caring nurse named Nina, an international search for a donor is initiated. Across the ocean in America, a rabbi named Joseph Neiman turns out to be a perfect match, and while this saves Luca's life, it raises many questions about his heritage which starts Luca on a lifelong journey trying to discover his ancestry. The writing flows easily and the message that everybody in this world is connected through our humanity and DNA is a good one, but there are several loose ends in the plot. The author writes about the horrible crimes, and the life-saving sacrifices committed during the holocaust in WWII but lacks the ending I was waiting for - to find out how Luca and Joseph are related. Even so, I found this a feel-good book and had to reach for the tissues more than once while reading. I highly recommend this book. ( )

This is a fascinating book on many levels. It touches on modern medicine, family ties (conflict between nature & nurture), crisis in faith, and the history of Italy during the war and the holocaust. From the latter I learned unexpected things about the response of ordinary Italians which made the experience of the Jews in Italy much different from the other countries overrun by Germany.

In 1992, Luca Taviano lives with his grandparents Letizia and Giovanni “in Favola, a tiny, out-of-the-way town in the hills of Piedmont – a town of fewer than three hundred people.” He is diagnosed with leukemia which does not respond to conventional treatment. A nurse, Nina Vocelli, becomes very attached to the spirited 9-year-old boy and risks her job to seek out other medical options for him. When a bone marrow transplant is recommended, it is discovered that Luca’s genes are typically found in Ashkenazi Jews. In fact, a possible donor is found in Brooklyn, but Rabbi Joseph Neiman’s wife objects to her husband donating his bone marrow to an Italian; during World War II, her father was held in an Italian detention camp and her grandparents were shipped to Auschwitz because an Italian woman identified them as Jewish. What is the connection between an Italian Catholic boy and an American Jewish man?

The theme of the novel is that we are all connected. Its title refers to the “magnificent dappled sea of bone marrow.” After the transplant, Luca "felt like his marrow donor was living inside him, that all his blood donors were living inside him.” But of course Luca is also connected to many others with whom he shares no genes. Rabbi Joseph, who works with a priest and an imam to build bridges between religions, decides, “Even if he weren’t directly related to Luca Taviano – or the relatedness went too far back to track or even if there was never one at all and the genetic similarities happened by pure chance – they were still related. The Catholic boy in Favola and the Jewish rabbi in Brooklyn shared important genes, and now they shared the same blood. They might not be members of the same tribe as defined by today’s sectarian standards, but they were members of the same tribe on a more fundamental level. Here was the perfect example of the blurring of boundaries that separated people: we are all connected.”

Pacing is a bit of an issue, and there are gaps in plotting. At times the plot moves very slowly as even minor events are described in detail. Later, major events are merely mentioned and their impact on Luca left unexplored. At the beginning, there is a great deal of focus on Nina’s affair with the married Dr. Matteo Crespi; later, we are told that Nina “moved in with Matteo” with no explanation of what happened to his wife. One minute Rabbi Joseph’s son is behaving criminally and the next minute he undergoes a transformation? Characters that feature fairly prominently just disappear from the plot. And at least two characters manage to convince authorities to “make an exception” and “bend the rules”?

It is obvious that the book was written by a doctor. Who else would write passages like “An assistant cleaned the skin with iodine and handed the surgeon a fifty-cubic-centimeter syringe fitted with a long, large-bore needle” and the bone marrow “contained stem cells – large, purple spheres with thin blue rims that didn’t look much different from Luca’s malignant lymphoblasts” and “the blood cells began to materialize, red and blue and shades in between, different shapes and sizes, representing distinct lineages and stages of development.” At times the tone is rather didactic: “But on the spectrum of human sbagli [mistakes], there was a lot worse than Nina’s recklessness. There were husbands who beat their wives, like Zev Saferstein; men who killed other men, like the Mafiosi who murdered the brave judges in Sicily; the old Italian woman who sold out Sarah Neiman’s grandparents for a few thousand lira; the Italian Fascists who worked with the Nazis, rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps.”

The novel tells an interesting story, but it would benefit from revision to tighten the plot. More focus on only what is most important to the main narrative would strengthen the book’s impact.

Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )