Corporal Rocco Raven, a scared Brooklyn kid assigned to the island of Malta during World War II, falls for Melita, a Maltese jukebox repairwoman, leading to a moving, funny, and, finally, calamitous wartime love affair. 25,000 first printing. In the annals of great literature, Malta's one potential claim to fame is that it might have been the location of Calypso's island in The Odyssey ; apart from that, this tiny, windswept island midway between Italy and Libya makes itself scarce on the fictional front. But Nicholas Rinaldi brings it front and center in his remarkable second novel, The Jukebox Queen of Malta , and if his descriptions of the place leave you cold, his characters won't. Set during the early years of World War II, the story begins with the arrival of American soldier Rocco Raven, late of Brooklyn, during an air raid. While running from an attacking Messerschmitt, Raven is rescued by Jack Fingerly, a shadowy character who may--or may not--be an Army intelligence officer. To Rocco, a car mechanic in civilian life with a taste for Melville, Nietzsche, and Edgar Allan Poe, nothing about Malta makes sense--except his feelings for Melita Azzard, the eponymous heroine whom he meets during one of the incessant bombings that punctuate life on the island: There was a freedom to the way she moved, a confidence and self-assurance. She paused to look up as yet another Stuka swept by, this one trailing a plume of black smoke from its fuselage. Then she looked back, over her shoulder, and saw him coming along half a block behind her. Though the romance between Rocco and Melita is at the heart of the novel, Rinaldi has more than wartime love on his mind. His island is a marvelous place populated by unhappy pilots who get promoted every time they're shot down; repairmen who have turned jukeboxes into a wartime industry; old men who dream of a "Greater Malta" composed of an annexed Italy ("Sicily we don't want, it's too full of thugs and mafiosi. Rome we give to the pope, but the rest of Italy is ours"); and ordinary people who carry on their quotidian lives in the midst of not-so-quotidian carnage. There's a dreamy, disturbing quality to this novel, as though Catch-22 and Alice in Wonderland met and married. Rocco blames it on the island: "Malta was doing this--everything shifting, turning, uncertain"; the reader, however, knows better. This jewel of a novel owes everything to Nicholas Rinaldi's tilted imagination and considerable prose talents. --Alix Wilber Although influenced by Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Rinaldi's World War II novel stands on its own unique merits. Fantastical with a touch of dark humor, it's both a moving love story and a gripping portrait of a tiny island under siege. (LJ 5/1/99) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Rinaldi's second novel, a wartime love story set in Malta during the German-Italian siege of 1942, follows the serendipitous military life of Rocco Raven, an army radioman from Brooklyn, sent to Malta by mistake to work for the deep-secret branch of army intelligence. There he is under the command of the shady and mysterious Fingerly, whose underground connections run from Gibraltar to Cairo and who eventually has Rocco unknowingly spy on the British. The real tale is Rocco's relationships with the islanders, especially Melita, with whom he falls in love. Throughout the island, Melita repairs jukeboxes, made by her older cousin Zammit, who uses whatever material he can scavenge from the bombing raids. With the ever-increasing shortages and imminent death from the Italian and German bombers, the novel evokes a sense of fatalism without falling back on the usual war-story triteness. And one is never so comfortable with Rocco and Melita's love affair as to decide beforehand that it is either doomed or triumphant because the novel's reality, the war, transcends those notions. Frank Caso The influences of Joseph Heller's classic Catch-22 and Louis de Bernieres' recent Corelli's Mandolin are rather too blatantly present in this otherwise well-constructed and quite likable second novel by poet and author Rinaldi (Bridge Fall Down, 1985). The story recounts the awkward coming-of-age of Corporal Rocco Raven, a young Brooklynite assigned to an intelligence unit based on the island of Malta, under German and Italian air attack, in 1942. Rocco is an engaging innocent, a well-meaning Candide (or Yossarian, for that matter) who can't find the Major to whom he's supposed to report, can't understand the complex wheeler-dealer patois of his superior officer, Captain (later Major) Fingerlyand can't resist the ripe erotic allure of Melita Azzard, the forthright Maltese girl who delivers and services the jukeboxes her resourceful cousin Zammit peddles to bars that cater to American and British military men. Rocco's brief encounter with Melita, inevitably destined to end when his unit is reassigned, is charmingly portrayedand both the wry energy and the bittersweet transien