Charming Village Life from Big Stone Gap to Italy
Categories: Fiction
Adriana Trigiani has written a charming trio of books centering on a woman of Italian descent who lives in a small Virginia coal-mining town. The Big Stone Gap novels are effortless, interesting reads.
Happily, according to Adriana Trigiani's web site, we can expect a new Big Stone Gap novel at the end of October: Home to Big Stone Gap. How wonderful!
Big Stone Gap (2000), the first of the novels, introduces our protagonist, pharmacist and part-time EMT Ave Maria Mulligan, and the cast of everyday characters that populates her small town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Ave Maria learns a long-guarded secret about herself and comes to terms with Who She Really Is.
The second two installments are just as appealing as the first, but they all attend to the grittiness of everyday life and consequently are not cloying.
In Big Cherry Holler (2001), Ave Maria must contend with the terrifying possibility of her handsome husband's Other Woman (...or is she?) and her own precarious path alongside infidelity.In the third, Milk Glass Moon (2002), Ave Maria and her husband Jack face the coming of age of their teenage daughter and their changing lives in middle age.
Also extremely enjoyable is Adriana Trigiani's Cooking With My Sisters (2004), a lovely book full of reminiscenses, recipes, and photos.
Trigiani's other fiction is a little bit edgier than the Big Stone Gap books:
- Lucia, Lucia (2003)
- Queen of the Big Time (2004)
- Rococo (2005)
