Review
Fifteen year old Antonia Lucia Labella is sweet, funny and ambitious. She's
eager to shake up the Vatican, and ready to be touched (literally) by love.
Grandmothers, mothers and daughters will enjoy sharing this comic story of a
miraculous first romance.
Antonia lives with her widowed mother and her grandmother above the family's
grocery store and attends an all-girl Catholic school in an Italian neighborhood
of Providence, Rhode Island. The Labellas and their neighbors are devout
Catholics, and their days are full of prayers, blessings, celebrations and
petitions to an attentive assembly of specialized saints ready to help them when
they are forgetful, sick, unlucky, or unloved. On the first-person novel's first
page (dated November 1, All Saint's Day), Freitas establishes that, to Antonia,
these saints are robustly real. When Antonia prays to St....
Beyond the Book
Contemporary Saints
Los Angeles artist J. Michael Walker thinks a lot like Antonia Labella,
heroine of
The Possibilities of Sainthood. In the
summer of 2008 he exhibited a series of large portraits of saints whose names
are commemorated in the roads and streets of many Los Angeles neighborhoods. Each
large, ink on paper portrait portrays a contemporary person as one of the saints
of the City of the Angels. The portraits connect the individual stories with the histories of saints, and blend the quotidian and the miraculous.
For his paintings, Walker researched not just the Catholic saints but the
103 L.A.
streets which have been named after them. In this way he created a
spiritual history of the city and a "saint map"...
