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Summary: Pass the biscotti, it's time for a great read!
Review: Our adorable lead character, Lucia, is a woman in her 70's who has recently befriended Kit, a young playwright in her building. During a conversation, Lucia begins to share the story of her life and so,....the story begins. Lucia attempts to chase her dreams, while trying to overcome the handcuffs of her Italian tradition and the confines of her 50's generation. Lucia is tenacious in her efforts to become an independent women, and her reality provides just enough grit to make her trek an intersting story. You find yourself investing in Lucia, so you love the empathy you feel regarding her conflicts and choices. By the end of this story, I wanted to drop in Lucia's apartment myself and enjoy a long conversation over a table of homemade rigatoni. A true pleasure to read.
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Summary: Excellent Read!!
Review: I loved everything about this book. I was so sorry to see it come to an end. I wished there was more of Lucia. She is an amazing character. Trigiani develops her so well that by the end of the book you feel as if you know her. All the characters become like friends. Lucia's joys made me smile and her heartbreaks made me cry. The book is very well-written, it's the type you just don't want to put down. The setting is great, too. Trigiani brings 1950's Manhattan to life. I highly recommend Lucia, Lucia.
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Summary: A Wonderful New Character from Trigiani
Review: This is a wonderful book, smart and vibrant. It was a leetle predictable at points, but still so much fun to read. Wonderful characters made it hard to put down, I read it in a day by bits and pieces. Adriana Trigiani writes vulnerable, appealing books that are a joy to read!
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Summary: A DELIGHT!!
Review: What a delight, for the reader to enter the world of Lucia Santori. Lucia is the sole daughter in a very traditional Italian-American family. Betrothed to the son of a deli owner whom she has known all of her life, Lucia's true love is her work. A custom seamstress/tailor at the revered B. Altman department store, Lucia is excellent at what she does, and enjoys it immensely. Her days are filled with dreams of furthering her career, and becoming reknowned in New York fashion circles. It soon becomes clear, however, that her fiancee and his family have other plans for her life. Their expectation is that Lucia will become a housewife, with her tailoring reduced to "taking in" sewing from neighborhood families.Shortly after calling off her engagement, Lucia meets a dashing young gentlemen by the name of John Talbot. John seems wonderful--he is rich, attentive, and takes Lucia to the finest places. The only one of the Santori family who is not equally as enamored with Mr. Talbot is Lucia's father, who warns her that he is not to be trusted. Faced with making a choice between his daughter and his dislike of the man, Lucia's father swallows his opinions and wishes his daughter well of her impending marriage. Gathering momentum, the story takes an unexpected twist when Lucia realizes that sometimes we must face the inevitable, however painful. DYB
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Summary: Brava Lucia! Brava Adriana!
Review: Returning to her themes of independent women who refuse to fill traditional roles of wife and mother, family values and devoted friendships, Trigiani transports the reader to 1950's Greenwich Village. The details of Italian family life, the upscale world of custom designed fashion and the Italian rural life make the predictable ending forgivable. Trigiani always gives me characters to love and respect. As a girl in the 1950's myself, I was only given role models created by Disney. Trigiani eschews the Cinderella/Prince Charming relationship when she makes her heroines out of stronger stuff. Brava!
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Summary: A weak ending/ loose threads threaten this, but still good
Review: At first, I was loving every page of this book. Even though I do not sew and don't care a tremendous amount about fashion, Trigiani really did a great job of pulling me into Lucia's world: the care she gave to sewing, how it made her feel, the clothing she wore and worked on. Lucia was very sympathetic. She wanted something more than what women aspired to in 1951 and even her friends could not understand her dreams. How terrible to be one of the early feminists and not have a peer group! The book is good until the last 1/4--which seems to be a trend lately. I suppose the last 1/4 of the book must be the most difficult to write. The book kind of rushed through the ending. Additionally, what should have been the climax for the book ended up falling a bit flat--since we the reader saw this coming--and then flailed around a bit. I truly felt Lucia's relationship with John Talbot weakened the book somewhat. Lucia is a career woman and doesn't even want to get married, yet this whole thing with John Talbot... I don't want to give it away, but it would have made MORE sense to me if Lucia herself would merely decided to call something off herself and come to this conclusion on her own, not as part of a reaction to not getting what she wants. It just seemed that the author could have done a better job of handling that. She danced around it with a conversation between Delmarr and Lucia, but she never nailed it. This could have been a stronger story, but it wasn't a bad story. It was light reading, enjoyable, but ultimately a bit of a let-down in the end. If you enjoy stories about this time period, pick it this up. I enjoyed this read very much until the last 1/4.
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Summary: Family - Feminism - Glitter - Glamour
Review: In Lucia Lucia the reader travels back 50 years to a post-war Greenwich Village, populated with lovingly rowdy, traditional, Italian families. Adriana Trigliani assembles a wonderful visual collage of the village streets - the Groceria (with father and four sons hard at work) and the mad baking family, the food and loving care in the traditional homes, as well as the glamour and hard work of the "custom department" at B. Altman's. I particularly enjoyed the sumptuous fabrics, elegant designs, the hats and gloves and the glamour that has all but disappeared from our t-shirt/blue jean/khaki's world. There is even a side trip to Italy under blue Mediterranean skies! Lucia is a smart and focused and hard working beauty, who banks most of her salary and irons her brother's shirts with no complaints every Saturday morning. As the feminist/good daughter goes through her own chrysalis, the writer elegantly shows the tradeoffs involved.-Mamalinda
Rating:
Summary: Good light read
Review: This book reminded me so much of my mother's stories from NY in the 1950s! If you have some old relative (yiddish, jewish, italian, hispanic, black, whatever) and you love to hear their stories, you'll like this book. Yes, the plot is filled with cliches-- women must remain virgins until they're married, devout Catholic families are intensely suspicious, old-world men frown upon career girls, a mother's only job is to serve her husband and marry off her kids, we're forbidden to marry outside our culture. The book over-dramatizes these cultural elements, but it adds amusement to the plot. It's not Shakespeare, but it's very entertaining and packs much more historical and cultural depth than that trash Danielle Steele and Judy Blume write. You can tell that the author did her research!
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Summary: A gem
Review: Lucia, Lucia is just a gem of a book. It is a sweet, yet compelling story of a young woman of Italian hertiage who longs to break with tradition and follow her dream to be an independent, career woman in the 1950's. The characters are rich and believable and story is peppered with so many delicious metaphors that the entire book comes to life with sights, sounds,tastes and scents. I have a friend who calls uncomplicated books like Lucia, Lucia 'bon bons for the mind'. If the bon bons are as sweet as Lucia,Lucia, then send me a whole box.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: This is the first book that I have read from Adriana Trigiani. I couldn't put the book down! She writes so beutiful. Wonderful story. I would highly recommend this book to others. I can't wait to read some more of Ms. Trigiani's novels.
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