I Love You Like a Tomato

Rating:
Summary: First in what will be a trilogy...
Review: This book tells the childhood and adolescent life and times of ChiChi Maggiordino, a girl new to America whose talents and sometimes bizarre behavior are the products of a hard times.
Immigrating from Italy in the hopes of pinning down the American soldier who is her father, ChiChi moves with her mother, grandmother, and sickly brother Marco.
However, life turns out to be far from the American dream. Chichi's mother basically loses it and when she isn't abusive she's neglectful. Life in America is a series of bad-luck for the Maggiordino family, and in the middle of it ChiChi is determined to hold their lives together. She will bargain with God, she will do whatever riuals she must, she will even go so far as to physically harm herself in the hopes of appeasing whatever force she must. She believes that her constant prayers, bargains and rituals saved Marco when he was small and ill, and have the power to keep her family together now.

And in the middle of misery she is determined to create laughter where there is none, embarking on a clowning/miming/dancing career while still young.

Read this engaging and entertaining story and follow ChiChi through her trials, meet the oddball characters that flow in and out of lives of the Maggiordino family, and most of all see the love ChiChi has for her younger brother Marco, whom she loves like a tomato.

Rating:
Summary: A very good read!
Review: This book was an excellent read and is supposed to be the first in a trilogy about the Maggiordano family. The ending left me wanting more and wondering what happens to the main characters - I can't wait for the next two books to come out.
ChiChi experiences a lot of what it's like to grow up as part of an Italian minority in a predominently waspy community and, while I don't think her experiences are typical, a lot of them were dead on regarding culture clashes that are still happening in certain places where Italians are a very small minority.
Brava, Signora Maggiordano!