title: Night Bloom: A Memoir
author:  Mary Cappello 
description: Cappello, a professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, has a lovely way with images: the "night bloom" of the title is a Night-Blooming Cereus that after much care blossoms suddenly at night, a flower that occasioned spontaneous parties in the Cappello family. These beautiful images tend to pile up without cohering, however, and the material in this disjointed memoir is somewhat familiar, if elegantly composed. Cappello sometimes takes hold of a good idea and overdoes itAin a few paragraphs she ties together a cousin with a glass eye, her parents harping that a new toy "could knock your eye out," her father's insistence that she and her siblings always wear seat belts and the importance of the evil eye in Sicilian-American culture. Cappello quotes liberally from the diaries kept by her grandfather, John Petracca, which are sometimes touching with their descriptions of extreme poverty ("October 22, 1941. I am working and starving") and sometimes very mundane ("October 1, 1941. Got out of bed early. Inspected my garden"). Some of his journals and other writings were in English and some were in Italian, and the fact that Cappello does not read Italian (because she is a "bona fide product of assimilation") occasionally hampers full understanding. Ultimately, this isn't a coherent whole but rather a grab bag of ideas, beautifully expressed. <br />Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  THE
  
  
  NIGHT
  
  
  OF THE
  
  
  FLOOD
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  THE
  
  
  NIGHT
  
  
  OF THE
  
  
  FLOOD
  
  
  
  
  
  ZOË SOMERVILLE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
  
  
  Copyright © Zoë Somerville, 2020
  
  
  The moral right of Zoë Somerville to be identified as the author of this work
  has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of
  1988.
  
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
  a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
  mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
  permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
  
  
  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed
  in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used
  fictitiously.
  
  
  A catalogue record f