In the
winter of 1913, Francesca, a very full-of-herself girl, was dragged
away from Minturno, her sunny village by the Mediterranean Sea, to
“dark” and “cold” America, kicking and screaming. Her daily
complaint-ridden letters to her “best friend ever,” Musetta, back in
the old country, brim with anger and anguish. She laments being ripped
from her two greatest loves, Gino, “a tall short order cook,” and her
beloved Italy. She reports her misery during the fourteen day journey
in steerage, her nightmarish landing at Ellis Island, her eye-opening
stay in Manhattan, her enlightening
journey aboard The Pennsylvania Railroad, and her arrival “on
Pittsburgh’s grimy doorstep,” as only an overly dramatic
sixteen-year-old girl could.
For more than half a century, she pens her deepest thoughts and passions, meant only for her dearest friend’s eyes. Only Musetta knew Francesca’s frustration in the ever-hopeful search for her “vanished” Papa, her internal wrestle with God and “the Church,” her acceptance of a loveless arranged marriage, her fears as a twenty-seven-year-old widow with four baby boys, her struggle through The Great Depression and two World Wars, her ferocious desire to hold onto her culture, her painful experiences with prejudice, her ostracism as an adulteress, her shame in being sentences to prison, and her never-ending burning desire to return home. Francesca’s long and colorful life touches the loves of Fiorella La Guardia, Chief Justice Michael Mussmano, Mario Lanza and jazz great Erroll Gardner.
This historical novel — a lifetime of letters, from one girlfriend to another, across an ocean, is filled with humor and heartache, insight and ignorance, arrogance and anguish. It chronicles twentieth century America, through a prism — the eyes of a recalcitrant immigrant, and reaches into the very marrow of the intricately complex, proud woman who always signed her full and formal name, Francesca Marie Sparagna Castelli.
