Lucia, Lucia
by Adriana Trigiani
Category: Fiction / General
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 5 April 2004
Number of pages: 336
Description:
From the author of the 'Big Stone Gap' series, comes this story of a passionate young woman whose fateful choice changes her life forever.
Review:
Kit rents a room in a house in Greenwich Village, New York. To earn a living she writes reviews of restaurants for magazines but her ambition is to write plays and, while waiting for success, she papers the wall of her rather squalid bathroom with rejection slips. Like the author Kit has an ear for a story and when one day Aunt Lu, the old lady on the top floor, invites her for tea and offers to tell the tale of her life Kit is enchanted. The story fills a book and will entertain the reader for many a long hour. It's a charming tale of Italian immigrants in America, their flair for selling, their feuds and their family loyalties. When Lucia Sartori was young she worked in the dressmaking section of the luxury department store B Altman. It was in the 1950s and Lucia was a modern girl who enjoyed everything about her work: the sewing, the colleagues and, most of all, the pay cheque which she banked every two weeks. A photograph taken in those years shows a stunningly beautiful girl in a gold lame dress and, as she tells Kit, she had many suitors. Lucia's ideas about a woman's place in the world did not quite chime with what her parents thought was right and best for her. These disagreements feed the plot but not always in a predictable way. Trigiani has a gift for creating the atmosphere of the past: the glamorous clothes copied from Dior and Balmain, the nightclubs and swish hotels, the warm atmosphere of a neighbourhood where Italian families knew each other intimately, meeting at church, in the stores and at weddings and funerals. Perhaps the most interesting aspect which Trigiani evokes is the chasm between uptown society families and these downtown boys and girls who were smart but not yet free to enter any club or profession they chose. A light novel, very entertaining and accomplished. (Kirkus UK)
Author's Biography:
Adriana Trigiani grew up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and now lives with her husband and daughter in New York City. In addition to being the bestselling author of BIG STONE GAP, BIG CHERRY HOLLER and MILK GLASS MOON, she is an award-winning playwright, television writer, and documentary filmmaker.
In Stock: 27 copies
