A hypnotizing coming-of-age novel set in 1950s Italy that stares into the heart of longing and at the friendships that have the power to save and destroy us.“I was utterly captivated, from first page to last.” –Anton DiSclafani, New York Times bestselling author of The After PartyIsabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their … Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella.
In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land coveted spots at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Pentila in northern Italy, a prestigious art history school on the grounds of a silent convent. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can reinvent herself as anyone she desires… perhaps even someone Isabella could desire in return.
But as that glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping a secret from her, one that will change the course of their lives forever.
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What we have here is a failure to fulfill.
Bridget, thanks to her half Egyptian, half white blood, struggles to find her place in her Connecticut Catholic school. When she and Isabella, one of the school’s stars, head to Italy after graduating to study art (at a convent where the nuns tend to be silent), Bridget hopes that she can start fresh. Isabella seems interested in a friendship, and maybe no one needs to know Bridget’s background.
So what could have been the story of how a girl’s desperation to connect and to be something affects her relationships instead turns into something more dull and rote. Bridget’s coming-of-age is reduced and distilled to a rather uninteresting plot of a very close friendship that turns out to be not as close as Bridget would have liked.
You might be frustrated by the lack of development of Isabella and some of the other supporting characters. You’re told just enough about Isabella that your curiosity is piqued. If nothing else, she’s far more interesting than Bridget, but ultimately she becomes one-note and flat.
I wanted to like this book. I love its title, I love its cover, I love its blurb. But I couldn’t get past the opportunities Anbara Salam passed up to make this more compelling.
I was very disappointed by this book. The story could have been poignant. Instead Anbara Salam’s characters leave you not caring what happens to them. Although Bridget is obsessed with Isabella, throughout the book she only worries about how things affect her. She shows no real care and concern for her family or friends. She lies to everyone. Isabella plays with Bridget like a toy. The writing wasn’t great. Overall it’s hard to like a book when you don’t care about the characters.
Bridget is a high school student who lives mostly in her head, an outsider, and doesn’t fit in at her Catholic school in Connecticut. Isabella is beautiful, sometimes mysterious, and often defiant of rules. The two girls couldn’t be more different. When Isabella begins making friend overtures toward Bridget, Bridget is delighted and hopeful of being included in the rich-girl’s cliques. They both are accepted into a program to study art centered in a nunnery in Italy.
The author’s storyline, while not entirely unique, could have been so much more than it ended up being. She had a chance to write a poignant story about wanting to fit in, to be loved, all set in, for the most part, Italy. Salam missed the boat because her characters are not engaging, readers will not necessarily care about either one. The writing is sometimes stilted with tons of missed opportunities to dig deeper. There was way too much telling and not enough showing.
This is not a book that you can’t wait to get back to. This is a book that is likely to be either much admired or much disliked. If you like coming-of-age stories with shallow characters and some angst, then this is the book for you. If you prefer coming-of-age novels that make you feel something, that take advantage of locales, and with characters you root for, this is not one of those books.
My thanks to Penguin and Edelweiss for an eARC.