Book review: “The Queen of Steeplechase Park” by David Ciminello

David Ciminello’s 2024 novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a wild and wacky foul-mouthed fantasy about free-spirit Belladonna Marie Donato and her circle of boundary-breaking friends in the tight, sad world of the 1930s Depression in New Jersey and at the beach at Coney Island.

Bella is the larger-than-life queen at the center of this quirkier-than-life story powered by her vibrant zest for living and absolute insistence to be her own person.

She rules over this novel which makes sense because, after all, she is at various points in the story:

• The ten-year-old Little Angel Queen of 1930 — flying in with white-chiffon wings from an eleventh-story fire escape down a pulley rope line to St. Anthony’s on the Feast of San Michele.
• The Meatball Queen — for her Italian Cooking Spirit wonders.
• The Carnival Queen.
• “Our Lady of Steeplechase, Miss Belladonna Marie! The Queen of Sin City!” — as the most popular hoochie-coochie dancer on the boardwalk at Coney Island at 16.
• The Coney Island Hula Queen.
• A Jazz-Age Queen — as in: “On rainy days and sunny days, too, Bella slipped the orange frock over her head. Then she popped open her matching parasol and floated around the Brooklyn beachside town, blazing up and down the boardwalk like a Jazz-Age Queen.  Like human lightning.”
• The Meatball Queen of Sin City — after switching from stripping back to cooking.
• The Queen of Coney Island — with her King, Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, the most beautiful boy anyone had ever seen who had posed for the painting of the crucified Jesus behind the altar at St. Anthony and served in that place as a huge distraction to Bella and later, in his pansexual way, found and fell in love with Bella and, with her, created a son and twice was set to marry her but, well, life can be hard.
• “The long-lost Meatball Queen of Clifton, New Jersey” — the name the well-dressed mobster uses for her when Bella decides on a wrong-headed plan to wed.

 

Loose-limbed

As all those Queens may indicate, The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a loose-limbed novel that’s probably a bit too loose-limbed for its own good.

Bella isn’t good at thinking things through, and her story is a rollicking account of her moving hither and yon and being pushed and pulled by circumstances.  And there’s a kind of chaos at its core.

You could say she’s a free thinker, but, really, she doesn’t do a lot of thinking.  She acts on her emotions — and on her innate sense of her self and her need to do whatever she wants to do.

She ends up on the margins of society with gay men and drag queens and circus freaks and a Sense and Sensibility-reading hoodlum and assorted other oddballs as her friends.  No, as her family!

(Her birth family being, as these things can happen, so different from her that she can only breathe if she can get away.)

 

Madcap vitality

As a novel, her story is probably a bit too chaotic.  Yet, what’s excellent about it is Ciminello’s full commitment to a character who won’t fit into society’s expectations and to the disorderliness of a life lived without rules.

Belladonna Marie Donato is a character that no one but an American could have created.  Her life is a screwball comedy with moments of tragedy.

The novel’s strength is in its profound madcap vitality.

 

Recipes

One final note: The Queen of Steeplechase Park isn’t just a novel.  It’s also a cookbook, featuring 16 mouth-watering Italian recipes — because, above all else, Bella is Queen of the Kitchen.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.25.25