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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780743255998
ISBN number: 0743255992
Label: Touchstone
Manufacturer: Touchstone
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: August 24, 2004
Publishing house: Touchstone
Sale Popularity Level: 241343
Studio: Touchstone
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The bestselling author of Stones from the River delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet -- the unforgettable story of an endearing, but also flawed, Italian American family.
In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise Theater, Yankee Stadium -- and in his imagination, where he longs for a stencil kit to decorate the windows like all the other kids on his street. Instead he gets a very different present: his uncle Malcolm's family.
Malcolm is in jail for stealing -- once again -- from his latest new job, and Anthony's aunt and twin cousins settle into the Amedeos' fifth-floor walk-up. Sharing a room with girls is excruciating for Anthony, despite his affinity for the twins. But the real change in Anthony's life comes one evening when he causes the unthinkable to happen, changing each family member's life forever.
Evoking all the plenty and optimism of postwar America, Sacred Time spans three generations, taking us from the Bronx of the 1950s to contemporary Brooklyn. Keenly observing the dark side of family -- and its gracefulness -- Hegi has outdone herself with this captivating novel about childhood's tenderness and the landscape of loneliness. Ultimately she reveals how the transforming power of a singular event can reverberate through a family for generations. With gravity and poise, Hegi turns her astute yet forgiving eye on the essential frailty and dignity of the human condition in this elegant and fast-paced novel.
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Rated by buyers 
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I love all of Ms. Hegi's books and this one was no exception! We start out with a young boy and his point of view. He has an Italian family and they are very amusing. He is an only child, but he has two cousins whom are twins. They are girls though. The girls and his Aunt Floria have no where to go. So they end up living with Anthony and his family. What happens will mark everyone for the rest of their lives, each in their own way.
I love different writing styles and didn't find it all upsetting for this one to jump ahead. Ms Hegi writes so well you didn't even notice. I got enough of a glimpse of everyone I just wish it didn't have to end. I wish I would have gotten this book sooner is my ONLY regret!
Rated by buyers -
Anthony, seven years old, is fairly content. His father has a good catering business and his mother and grandparents dote on him. He even likes his cousins, eight-year-old Belinda and Bianca, in small doses. Now Christmas is coming, though, and his uncle is in jail again, so his aunt and cousins have moved in with his family. Anthony is crowded out of his space. He has to share his room with his cousins, and his aunt's sewing materials are taking up much of the apartment's living room. Anthony also picks up on his mother's irritation at having to take in their relatives, which adds to his overall stress. One day while Anthony and Bianca are alone in a room, she falls out of the sixth-floor window to her death.
This tragedy affects the entire family. Anthony is guilty about his part in Bianca's death, and weighted down by his family's unspoken belief that he pushed her. Belinda is guilty of picking a fight with her twin just before her death, and she stands as a permanent reminder of what the family has lost. The twins' father is guilty of having been in prison when his daughter died, unable to even attend the funeral. Anthony's parents and aunt all feel as though they should have been able to do something to avert this tragedy.
The writing in this story was beautiful, and it was interesting to read events from different points of view. However, it was sad to read about a family that was broken and even over the course of decades, was unable to fix itself. It seems that if Anthony had been encouraged to tell his story, perhaps he, at least, could have been able to heal. Instead, his cousin's death haunted him and ended up affecting the family he started as well as the family in which he grew up.
Rated by buyers 
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Sacred Time" follows two lines of one Italian-American family during the last half of the 20th century as its members try to integrate and move on from a shared and tragic event.
I found this story less inspiring than Hegi's "Stones from a River", too preoccupied with loss, guilt, longing and death. But Hegi goes as deeply into the particulars of her settings and locales as she does when she's exploring the minds and hearts of her characters, or what it's like to feel tired and sweaty, or how we sometimes see in strangers reflections of something in ourselves. This impeccable depth of detail makes this book really good.
Told from the perspectives of several family members, the story opens onto urban childhoods amid popular commercial artefacts of the 1950's - Studebakers, Woolworth's jewelry packaging, Howdy Doody, Dragnet, and Davy Crockett. There's even one of those dime store pictures of Jesus that gave him too good (surely she means too orange?) a tan.
This charming coming-of-age tale suddenly shifts, catapulting the reader, along with the family, into a tragedy that affects each member forever. Hegi is able to maintin a consistently calm and lyrical tone however harrowing are the emotions she's so tenderly handling. It is this ability that inspired me rather than the story's content.
While I enjoyed its vivid characterisations, the book was overall so dark and sad that I'm now yearning for something lighthearted, such as a drive along Liguria's coast (Liguria provided one setting for Floria, a character I really felt for), or some pretty martini, or a night out swing-dancing to really happy music.
Rated by buyers 
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I found this book on an awards list and listened to it on CD. It was difficult to finish because I just didn't care about any of the characters. The only redeeming part of the book is the charming narrative with which it opens, told from the viewpoint of a little boy growing up in a close-knit Italian-American family. But the narratives of the adults, which follow, are predictable and fall hopelessly flat. There are the obligatory infidelities and a lesbian dalliance, and there is even some completely gratuitous George Bush bashing! There is much better contemporary fiction out there.
Rated by buyers -
What should a family do when its fabric has been irreparably torn by an unintended tragic accident? Should its members seek to forget and minimize the trauma caused by sudden loss? How can those who suffer from guilt face those who have rage boiling beneath an appearance of acceptance? Ursula Hegi tackles these issues in her compelling and important novel, "Sacred Time," a work which tracks one family's journey through fifty years of suppressed mourning, recrimination and remorse.
Hegi is at her best when she focuses on Anthony Amedeo, who is at the epicenter of tremors unleashed by a fatal accident which he innocently abetted during his Bronx childhood. "Marked and isolated" by his involvement in the accident, suffused with "dread and fear," Anthony's life has been marked by his conscious repudiation of wants. He has concluded that his childhood desire -- for his own space, his own toys, his own personality -- has caused his family to fracture. Confiding to his estranged wife as an adult, Anthony's characterization of himself as "the devil" encapsulates his self-hatred, his suspicion that life offers little to hope for and much to be afraid of.
The loss of his cousin is "one huge ripple -- a tidal wave, rather" that "seized" all the members of his family and "flung" them into a territory where there is "no common focus, only conflicting angles of vision, colliding and aligning" in a "chaotic mosaic." Marraiges crumble; silences replace language, and the children affected by the tragedy struggle to regain their bearings. Anthony's cousin Belinda is haunted by the absence of her twin sister, and it is with great difficulty that she emerges as an intact adult.
Hegi is masterful in her recreation of the Bronx during the McCarthy scare of the early 1950s. Her use of dialogue advances a crisp narrative, and she seems to have a genuinely compassionate sensitivity for the life of a child whose dreams are altered very first by family circumstances and then by tragedy. Anthony's mother, Leonora, is by far the most complicated and satisfying of the adult characters of the novel.
Less convincing is the author's treatment of Anthony's aunt Floria. Over one-third of the novel explores her psychological metamorphosis, and much of that simply doesn't work. Floria's extended stay in Italy devolves into maudlin melodrama; her death is depicted in a quasi-Joycean stream of consciousness that is contrived and predictable. Hegi doesn't seem to realize that the greatest strength of "Sacred Time" is its treatment of serious emotional questions through a powerful narrative. When she overwrites or gets bogged down in psychobabble, her novel becomes mundane.
Early in the novel, the child Anthony rejoices at the stories told by his family. His mother and aunt compete to retell, embellish and recreate "one thread of a story and spin it along." With "passion," family members listen, then "leap into a story and spin it along." "Sacred Time" succeeds because it advances Anthony's odyssey through the thread of a story, a thread which finds itself in the lives of the entire Amedeo family. That thread of hidden fear, unspoken grief and unforgiven remorse, when stitched properly, makes this a novel worth reading and remembering.
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