Richly imbued with imagination, charming in their irony, and eminently readable, The Boy with Two Mothers and The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children are alive with a subtle "magic," presenting unforgettable characters across a canvas of European socio-political upheaval. These are classic stories which will haunt the mind long after their reading. In each, Bontempelli fulfills what he believed was the writer's ultimate goal: "to tell a dream as if it were reality and reality as if it were a dream."