33 year old Valentine Roncalli loves fashioning the custom shoes produced by her family’s 100 year old wedding shoe company in NYC’s Greenwich Village. Unfortunately, her grandmother has run into some financial trouble and her brother wants to sell the property to pay off the debts. Valentine tries to find a way to save the company, and a design competition offers the opportunity she needs to get Angelini Shoes back on track.Maybe it’s because I’m going to both NYC and Italy soon (both important settings in the novel), but I really enjoyed reading this one. Usually I’m not one for overly descriptive writing, but I was fascinated by the details involved in handcrafting shoes, in cooking Italian food, and just about everything else Trigiani set her keen eye on. For example, I really appreciated the truth of this passage:
"I miss big, bulky old-fashioned cameras that you wear around your neck on a strap. Most of all I miss the fact that you used to have to save the film for the best moments because it was too expensive to squander. Now, we take pictures of everything, including pictures of people taking pictures." (p 298)
Valentine was just the kind of character I really like too – complex, approachable, witty, driven and independent. Her family and friends keep telling her she needs a man in her life, and she does enter a relationship with a fellow work-a-holic, restaurant owner Roman, but he’s not her focus which I found quite refreshing. This isn’t one of those chick-lit novels where the entire romance is predictable – rather, it keeps you guessing, just like real life.
VERY VALENTINE is out in paperback now and you can read the first 62 pages online at HarperCollins. It is the first in a trilogy, and the second, BRAVA VALENTINE (which I will be reading next month) was recently released in hardcover. Find out more about the books at the author’s website.
Valentine was just the kind of character I really like too – complex, approachable, witty, driven and independent. Her family and friends keep telling her she needs a man in her life, and she does enter a relationship with a fellow work-a-holic, restaurant owner Roman, but he’s not her focus which I found quite refreshing. This isn’t one of those chick-lit novels where the entire romance is predictable – rather, it keeps you guessing, just like real life.
VERY VALENTINE is out in paperback now and you can read the first 62 pages online at HarperCollins. It is the first in a trilogy, and the second, BRAVA VALENTINE (which I will be reading next month) was recently released in hardcover. Find out more about the books at the author’s website.
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