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The Girls of Piazza d'Amore

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A quintessential Calabrian love story. The Girls of Piazza d'Amore traces the lives of three village girls and the forces that lead them to leave home for a new life across the ocean. Set in southern Italy in the 1950s, Connie Guzzo-McParland's short novel walks us through the piazza and the narrow alleys of her own childhood, imaginatively recreating an entire world as seen through the eyes of a young girl who accompanies her friends on their evening passeggiate to the spring water fountain and carries their love notes to the boys they love. The joys of Calabrian village life are palpable, and so are its frustrations and heartbreaks, but this is a world on the cusp of irrevocable change, as family after family is leaving. And that's what is most heartbreaking of all.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 18, 2013
      In 1955, the village of Mulirena is on the verge of radical transformation, as more and more families leave Italy to seek new opportunities in North America. Nine-year-old Caterina witnesses the last days of the old way of life before her family immigrates to Montreal. Fiction blurs with memoir in Guzzo-McParland's debut novel, as the older Caterina, like the author herself, seeks to write a Calabrian love story inspired by memories, finding that she cannot separate the lives of the older girls she admires from the story of the village and its people. While at times it can be hard to keep track of the many characters, and there are moments when exposition slows the pace of the novel, Guzzo-McParland's characters such as Professore Nucci and U Gruncu ("the crab") are vivid, and her descriptions of place, customs, clothing, and food are evocative and memorable. The stunning tale of a "marriage by proxy"âin which the bride plans "the best wedding that Mulirena had ever seen," even though the groom she has not yet met is in Montreal and his brother stands in for him at the ceremonyâhighlights the tension between the customs of the old world and the unknown future that awaits immigrants in their new home.

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