Adriana Trigiani’s just-published novel, “Brava, Valentine” (Harper) is the second book in a trilogy about a hard-working New Yorker named Valentine Roncalli, but I can testify that it works just fine as a stand-alone experience.
Trigiani is one of those best-selling writers I’ve been hearing good things about from friends for a long time, but have just never gotten around to reading.
Fortunately, I had to read “Brava” to prepare for an interview with the writer last week — she’ll be at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison next Thursday — and now I’m dying to get to “Very Valentine” and the rest of Trigiani’s backlist.
One of the blurbs on the new novel calls the writer’s approach “Sex and the City” meets “Moonstruck” — that’s a fairly good description but Trigiani adds many elements of her own devising to tell a story of work and romance and family in contemporary Manhattan (with great side trips to Italy and Argentina).
Valentine is just in the process of taking over the family business when “Brava, Valentine” begins. Her beloved widowed grandmother has found love in her native Italy and has decided to marry and relocate there, leaving the small Greenwich Village shoe factory to her granddaughter.
Valentine wants to expand the business from a high-end custom-made shoe operation into a larger concern that can supply department stores as well as specialty shops.
Our heroine believes she has found love in Italy — at the wonderfully warm and funny wedding that opens the novel — but when she gets back to New York she is not sure what role a sexy older man named Gianluca can play in her life (although he does write fantastic love letters to her).
“I know about women who drop the lives they lead in one place to go and be 
with a man in another,” Valentine confides to us in an early chapter.
“I’m fascinated by their impulse to choose the possibility of love over the certainty of work. I would never leave my work behind for a man, no matter how scrumptious he might be. I am, however, interested in romance on my own terms, and in my own time. I’m no master craftsman when it comes to love, strictly an apprentice in training.”
Although this is the second volume of a trilogy, I never had the feeling of being lost in the middle of a story. The writer’s supporting characters — especially an ex-Paul Taylor dancer named June Lawton who works in the shop and is a quintessential hip New York City senior citizen — are so vivid that we are drawn to them right away.
Trigiani sucks a new reader right in with strong characters and situations that are immediately involving — it’s a bit like the feeling I had when I started watching “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” in their second seasons. The shows hooked me on the spot and then I went back to see what I had missed.
Every book she wrote is terrific and she never let me down yet. There are authors who are great for a couple of books and then go on their reputation and produce a book a year, non worth looking at.
Comment by Marsha — February 8th, 2010 @ 1:20 pm