About Fiery Falls
The Historical Novel, Fiery Falls, is set from 1901 to 1918. The title reflects seventeen-year-old Donna and her middleclass family?s experience during a volatile period in America history. Not only must she cope with her dysfunctional unloving family, she must also deal with societies? intolerances, prudery, and bigotry during the turn of the century, coupled with stringent old world family values. Donna wants to be an artist, but her controlling, unfeeling self-centered father, Michael, insists that she become a concert violinist. He tells her that marriage will interfere with her career, and bring her down socially. Her mother, Annunziata, is no help to Donna and is incapable of love. As a result, she, her spirited sixteen-year-old sister, Gloria, and twelve-year-old brother, Alphonso, are love-starved. Her father dreams that he will live in her reflected glory and will travel around the world mingling with royalty and heads of state. Donna?s dream is of finding a poet like Robert Browning who will love and rescue her. She meets Raymond who seems to fulfill her hopes, but will he? Will their dreams become nightmares? Seeking love, she marries Raymond but finds him as unloving as her father. She has an affair and is now pregnant by her lover. To have an affair during this time is bad enough, but to have a child by that man is unthinkable. Her husband and her lover are in France during WWI, therefore, she must face her predicament by herself. What will she do? Will she have an abortion, give the child up for adoption, or raise the child in an intolerant world? Fiery Falls is the second novel of a trilogy and like the first novel, Fiery Fields, deals with some of the difficulties that Italians faced in this country during the early twentieth century. In addition, it deals with what a second generation must face when two cultures are pulling at them. Yes, striving for an existence was difficult during this time, but equally difficult was the intolerance that did not stop with the first generation. Intolerance affected Italians well into the middle of the twentieth century and even beyond. A chance remark by my father about the historic 1913 Paterson Silk Strike sparked the idea for the historical novels, Fiery Fields, Fiery Falls, and Fire Storm (now in progress). Papa was among more than 24,000 striking workers that had assembled upon the fields at the Botto?s family house in Haledon, NJ. For seven long grueling months, the strikers gathered to listen to the members of the International Workers of the World. Among the speakers were the legendary Big Bill Hayward, Carlo Tresca, John Reed, and the passionate speaker, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. While the conditions in the garment factories, silk mills and dye shops were grueling, the conditions at the coalmines were worse, (i.e. the 1913 Ludlow, Colorado Massacre). Almost everywhere in America, the Italians were suffering from indentured servitude. Yet, Italian
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