Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood

These tales of an Italian-American neighborhood on Chicago's North Side during the 1950s and '60s go further than the usual picturesque ethnic memoir, with Ardizzone (Larabi's Ox) taking them that extra step through added complexity and carefully chosen language. The narrator of ""Baseball Fever"" recalls how, as a young boy, he confused Catholicism and baseball into one entity, leading to a unique perspective on religion: God ""had several legions of good angels (my first lesson in the concept of the deep bench) waiting with drawn swords behind him."" Meanwhile, the somewhat slatternly Bobbi plans to seduce her chaste Catholic boyfriend in order to bond with him forever, but instead she angers him in ""The Daughter and the Tradesman."" In ""The Language of the Dead,"" a boy insists to a ""fat Christian brother"" that he was not the one who instigated a fight during a school basketball game that resulted in over $300 in damage. And ""Ladies' Choice"" describes the rituals of attending Sunday night dances for kids where ""You don't have to be a Catholic to get in, but Catholics pay fifty cents less."" All of these stories distinguish themselves through empathetic portrayals of unexceptional people described in exceptional language. (Mar.)