Boston Castrato

A modern classic in the making. This book does for 1920s Boston what E.L. Doctorow did for New York in Ragtime: it grabs a city out of history and makes it vivid. Be it the high style of the Parker House Hotel; the flagrant, fragrant set who dance attendance on the poet Amy Lowell; the scientists and shipbuilders and politicians and utter rogues who raise the city from the dirt; it all shimmers into reality as an outsider leads us is into its quaking heart. Raffi, a young Italian, is our guide. He left more than his country behind in Rome. Snipped by a bishop as the last castrato, he is bundled off to America when the Church takes shame. Forbidden to use his voice, other skills steal him into the society of 1920s Boston. Raffi enters the hardest quest of all the search for a genuine love song. AUTHOR: Colin W. Sargent (a relation of John Singer Sargent, who also splashes an appearance in the book) is a poet, playwright, novelist, and founding editor and publisher of Portland Magazine. As a helicopter pilot, Sargent was entranced by the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, he has an M.F.A. from Stonecoast and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. He divides his time between the coasts of Maine, Virginia, and, when possible, the rest of the world.