Lucia, Lucia

Moving from Greenwich Village of the present day to New York City of the 1950s, Adriana Trigiani's sweet family saga is rich in heart and overflowing with Italian passion. Lucia Sartori, a woman of a certain age, befriends Kit, a young playwright living in her building. Over tea, Lucia reminisces about her start in the fashion business as an apprentice designer; her large, loving family; and the curse her aunt placed upon her before she was born. Narrator Cassandra Campbell is especially effective as the flighty Kit, with her ingenuous questions and reactions; however, the Italian accents Campbell gives to Lucia are wobbly, and her voice is a bit too ladylike for the older woman's hot-blooded rages. As wardrobes grow more elegant and champagne starts flowing, Campbell's performance adds to the glamour. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

July 7, 2003
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.

Lucia Sartori is the only daughter in an Italian family living in New York City during the postwar boom of the 1950s. When her ambitions turn to fashion design, her life becomes both glamorous and complicated. Mira Sorvino escorts the listener through Lucia's exciting and tumultuous career with insightful precision, carefully representing Italian dialects, phrases, and emotion. When Lucia finds herself in the midst of a scandal, Sorvino provides the bravado and pacing to keep the story on track, carefully providing equal commitment to all the characters. Although differentiation between male and female characters could have been more prominent, Sorvino's performance as Lucia is excellent. B.J.P. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine