Blue Italian

Skillfully capturing the daily quirks of life in a boisterous, working-class ethnic family—daily assaulted by family clamor, endless courses of food, embarrassment and fierce love—Blue Italian traces the pitfalls of the young life and three-year marriage of a wise-cracking and heart-winning heroine, Rosa Salvatore. With an ear for acid dialogue and an eye for everyday ironies, Ciresi unfolds Rosa Salvatore's tale: growing up on fantasies, guilt, and fagioli in the New Haven working-class Italian neighborhood of Pizza Beach; working her way through a local college by slinging hash, while agonizing over her thighs and aching for passion; landing a job and meeting Gary Fisher, a nice Jewish lawyer from Flushing with a great butt and angst of his own. Rosa and Gary fall in love, make love, get married, fight, make up, fight again—until Gary is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and Rosa realizes the power of her love—and the crushing force of regret.

Frank and warm, crackling with razor-sharp wit, Blue Italian is a love story about an ill-fated couple who almost missed realizing how much they loved each other. It establishes Rita Ciresi as a writer with a unique gift for language, character, and emotion—a novelist to read, and a novelist to watch.

Skillfully capturing the daily quirks of life in a boisterous, working-class ethnic family—daily assaulted by family clamor, endless courses of food, embarrassment and fierce love—Blue Italian traces the pitfalls of the young life and three-year marriage of a wise-cracking and heart-winning heroine, Rosa Salvatore. With an ear for acid dialogue and an eye for everyday ironies, Ciresi unfolds Rosa Salvatore's tale: growing up on fantasies, guilt, and fagioli in the New Haven working-class Italian neighborhood of Pizza Beach; working her way through a local college by slinging hash, while agonizing over her thighs and aching for passion; landing a job and meeting Gary Fisher, a nice Jewish lawyer from Flushing with a great butt and angst of his own. Rosa and Gary fall in love, make love, get married, fight, make up, fight again—until Gary is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and Rosa realizes the power of her love—and the crushing force of regret.

Frank and warm, crackling with razor-sharp wit, Blue Italian is a love story about an ill-fated couple who almost missed realizing how much they loved each other. It establishes Rita Ciresi as a writer with a unique gift for language, character, and emotion—a novelist to read, and a novelist to watch.

Publishers Weekly

Smooth prose, a snappy pace and clever, if nasty, repartee give a veneer of fun to Ciresi's bittersweet debut novel (after the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning short-story collection Mother Rocket). But under the shiny surface of this funny, earthy work there's a tremendous amount of pain as, after three years of marriage, Rosa Salvatore and her 31-year-old husband, Gary Fisher, face the fact of his terminal cancer. Bookended by Gary's diagnosis and his rapid decline, the narrative traces their courtship and marriage. Insecure, self-deprecating Rosa, from a working-class, Italian Catholic New Haven neighborhood known as Pizza Beach, is determined to earn a college degree and escape her past. As a hospital social worker, she meets Gary, a wealthy Jewish law student at Yale, when they work together on the case of a black client named Ivory White. Both Rosa and Gary had terrible childhoods, thanks to outrageously neurotic parents. Rosa's are lower-class loudmouths; Gary's mother is a snooker champion who constantly bickers with his father. Both sets of parents are glad to see their children marry, however, and all grieve after Rosa has a miscarriage. Gary's death brings none of the survivors closer, with Rosa suffering many regrets. Ciresi's depiction of New Haven's blue-collar ethnic neighborhoods is complete with local color. Her facile comic energy makes for entertaining reading, though constant wisecracking robs the characterization of some depth. Yet there is real substance in this tragicomic story of two people with smart mouths and starved hearts groping their way towards a love they don't get much chance to enjoy. (Sept.)

Rita Ciresi is the author of Mother Rocket, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novels Pink Slip and Blue Italian. She lives with her husband and daughter in Florida.