Lucia, Lucia
A Novel
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This heartwarming tale is full of lessons about taking risks in life and love.”—Cosmopolitan
“Funny, visual, and moving . . . A vibrant, loving, wistful portrait of a lost time and place.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch
It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City, and Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is rife with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman department store on Fifth Avenue. Engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the steadfast Dante DeMartino, Lucia is torn when she meets a handsome stranger who promises a life of uptown luxury that career girls like her only read about in the society pages.
Forced to choose between duty to her family and her own dreams, Lucia finds herself in the midst of a sizzling scandal in which secrets are revealed, her beloved career is jeopardized, and the Sartoris’ honor is tested.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenwich Village is a far cry from the rural Virginia of Trigiani's best-selling trilogy (Big Stone Gap; Big Cherry Holler; Milk Glass Moon), but the emotional terrain covered in the author's first novel is warmly familiar. Poignant and feeling, it looks back on the experiences of the beautiful daughter of an Italian-American family in Greenwich Village in the early '50s. Kit Zanetti, a young playwright in present-day New York, accepts an invitation to the apartment of "Aunt Lu," as she is known in their building. Aunt Lu on first glance is an eccentric lady in her 70s who trails around in a fur. Once Kit can be bothered to listen, however, she finds out that Aunt Lu was once the most beautiful girl in Greenwich Village, Lucia Sartori, an intelligent and ambitious seamstress in the custom department at B. Altman's, who's determined not to let the traditions of her loving family lock her into the patterns of the past. When her impending marriage to childhood sweetheart Dante threatens just that, she refuses him, startling her beloved family. Then, fatefully, she meets the dapper John Talbot, who seems the man of her dreams, even draping her in full-length mink, and she ignores the signs that he is trouble and plans marriage. Jilted on her wedding day, Lucia finds out that he is a con man. Despite her pain, she decides to go to California to follow her dream, but when her mother falls ill she does exactly what she was trying to avoid: she becomes the maiden aunt and caretaker of the Sartori clan. Will some well-meant meddling by Kit disarray Lucia's carefully controlled life? This old-fashioned drama wears its heart on its sleeve subtlety is not its strong suit but readers will laugh with and weep for Lucia and her lost dreams. 10-city author tour.
