Tina, Mafia Soldier

Starred review from January 23, 2023
The life of Tina Cannizzaro, the protagonist of this outstanding Italian noir from journalist and cultural critic Cutrufelli, takes a traumatic turn after she witnesses at age eight the assassination of her mafioso father in 1980s Sicily. By the time she’s a teenager, she has acquired the nickname ’a masculidda (or tomboy) and gained notoriety as the leader of a street gang of teenage boys. Secretly, however, Tina harbors the ambition to be more than just a petty gangster and to earn respect as a full member of Cosa Nostra. Such ambitions come at a price, however, and she ends up in deadly conflict with the mafia clans themselves. Much of Tina’s career is related through the lens of a writer trying to locate her for the subject of a book, and it’s the eventual meeting of the two that brings Tina’s story to its powerful climax. The fully developed characters complement the richly portrayed Sicilian setting, and a lengthy translator’s note provides useful background on the novel’s time and place. Readers interested in strong female characters won’t want to miss this tour de force.

Starred review from March 1, 2023
The story of Tina, the Sicilian Mafia's lone female gang leader, draws a writer from Rome to Gela, where she hopes to discover everything she can about her first novel's muse. In Gela, the pollution-belching Petrochimico plant provides jobs for the inhabitants of the city's illegally constructed neighborhoods. Those, in turn, provide an opportunistic crop of young gang members to do the Cosa Nostra's bidding. Tina's criminal life began after her father's Mob-ordered execution spurred her to lead her own gang of child thieves. The novelist, our anonymous narrator, circles her target, collecting stories from both sides of the law and from Tina's priest, school physician, family members, and closest friend. Proud, poverty-stricken Gela and Tina's determined quest for significance both emerge forcefully as the story's twin focuses. By the time the narrator enters Tina's presence, the story's end has been determined, and Gela's truth tellers must attempt to find meaning in the aftermath of Tina's tough criminal leadership and struggle to define her own identity. Cutrufelli, a respected Italian feminist journalist, based Tina's story on the lives of female Cosa Nostra gangsters during Gela's volatile 1990s gang wars, infusing the novel with a haunting sense of alienation that pushes beyond familiar Mafia tropes to explore questions of self-determination and identity.

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