A forbidden love between a soldier in a foreign land and a beautiful Italian villager sparks a cycle of love and consequences that spins for two generations in Mia Farone: Lost and Turned Out, the first attempt at fiction by former state legislator TD El-Amin.
In his self-published novel, El-Amin carries the reader on an emotional roller coaster that starts long before the title character is even a twinkle in her parents’ eye in a small Tuscan village and eventually lands her on the hard streets of St. Louis.
While El-Amin fails to truly breathe life into each of his ensemble of characters, he deserves points for audacity, ambition and imagination.
The moral of his story is a unique spin on the age-old adage “those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it,” applied here to life and love lessons that go ignored. The book’s title character falls victim to a revolving door of pain and heartache mostly because of her own blissful ignorance.
The half-black, half-Italian beauty is forced to leave the comfort of a stable and ideal upbringing because of her father’s indiscretions. He pays the ultimate price for his actions. She must quickly adapt to St. Louis after being uprooted from her home country, learning to code-switch and power-play within certain criminal elements.
El-Amin could have used a keen editorial eye to help him trim the fat of excessive back stories devoted to supporting characters that don’t contribute to his central narrative.
He also could have used a woman’s insight to aid in the process of expressing the heart and minds of his female characters – Farone, in particular. He seems to borrow the formula of predictable themes and plot twists from popular urban literature to aid him in the process of personalizing women on the page.
But he nails the drive, street savvy and machismo of the male subjects of his story – especially Farone’s main love interest and antagonist, Bri. Even though they, too, fit a certain format, he gives the reader a birds-eye view into their emotional intentions and vulnerabilities in dramatizing the fury of a man scorned.
As you turn the final pages of Lost and Turned Out, it is obvious that Mia Farone’s world being turned upside down is far from over. The question becomes: Will she finally learn the lessons she was denied due to painful family secrets? We’ll have to wait for the sequel, as this is only the first part of a planned trilogy.
TD El-Amin will read from his novel Mia Farone: Lost and Turned Out along with Virvus Jones and Chris King – who will read from their own unpublished novels – at the Missouri History Museum on Friday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m. for more information on this free reading, visit www.mohistory.org. Order his book at http://www.tdelamin.com/.
