Lucia, Lucia by Adriana Trigiani – 260 pages
Book Blurb:
It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City. Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is ripe with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman’s 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.
My Review: 3.5 stars
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Lucia, Lucia is a warm dose of chick-lit fit for a lazy Sunday read. I was in between books and decided to pick something up that’s been sitting on my shelf for years. At only 260 pages it is a quick read, but Adriana Trigiani doesn’t need much time to have the reader invested in Lucia Sartori’s life. The book is charming, honest, heartbreaking and heartwarming.
This story is set in the 1950s, in the Italian area of Greenwich Village. Told in first person, we quickly learn of Lucia’s desire to have it all: a loving husband and happy home all while holding down a job at an illustrious department store in Manhattan. As a woman who has had a taste of what the working world has to offer due to the post war job boom, Lucia is eager to follow her progressive dreams. But her dreams don’t align with the expectations that society has burdened her with. She is a highly enlightened woman for the 1950s.
This novel focuses on the American dream, and the price at which it comes. Trigiani expertly weaves together Lucia’s two passions: her work and her family. This is a story that’s been exhausted in literature, yet the obligations she has to her traditional Italian family, and the tension it causes, is at the heart of this story.
Overall, this is an extremely quick read while enjoying a progressive woman of the 1950s.
Quotes I liked:
In my mind, the most dangerous people in the world are insecure women. They can do more damage in a day than an army.”
-“When people are filled to the brim with love, they are their most beautiful.”
-“The good things that happen to us were meant to happen, and the bad things that happen are lessons meant to teach us to be better.”
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