magical realism

Lyrical, Literary, Loathsome, and Lifeless Author: Francesca Manfredi Valentia lives in the “blind house,” in rural Italy, growing up with her religious grandmother and her disenchanted, flighty mother. The house is said to be cursed; the women abnormal. The townsfolk stay away, and as her period approaches and she grows from childhood into womanhood, Valentia suspects that the walls weeping blood, the plagues of locust and frogs, and the men who cannot remain are all somehow tied to her. Has the curse come alive again through her emerging womanhood? The Empire of Dirt is ostensibly a coming-of-age novel, told through the [...]