Not that Lake Como. The other one. In 2004, residents of the small New Jersey shore town of South Belmar voted to rename their borough after the better-known location in Italy. In Adriana Trigiani's delightfully charming romantic dramedy, The View from Lake Como, 33-year-old Giuseppina "Jess" Capodimonte Baratta, an "unhappy woman," can't wait to leave.
Jess is recently divorced (to the chagrin of family and community) from her hometown husband, living in her parents' damp basement, and drafting marble installations for her beloved 73-year-old Uncle Louie's ancestral business. She's been accessing online advice from Thera-Me in an effort to keep from "dying inside a day at a time." When Uncle Louie dies unexpectedly, leaving Jess his business, an IRS bookkeeping investigation, and a plane ticket to Italy, she dashes to Carrara, where Michelangelo mined his marble, to learn the trade from the ground up, free to sculpt a new life.
Jess's romance with Italy begins with an attic room overlooking a picture-postcard piazza and a mentor: her landlady's alluring son, Angelo Strazza, the "best gilder in Tuscany." Their relationship develops during travelogue excursions to Angelo's studio, Michelangelo's quarry, the original Lake Como, entrancing Pisa and Milan, and a truffle hunt in Siena. Jess's discovery of a secret lineage culminates in a bombshell family reunion.
Trigiani (All the Stars in the Heavens) has written a love letter to Italy and families seasoned with food, romance, self-empowerment, and Aunt Lil's zeppole recipe. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic