Becoming Mariella

<b>For fans of Elena Ferrante's <i>The Lying Life of Adults</i> and Jean Kwok's <i>Girl in Translation </i>comes a contemporary coming-of-age tale about a young Italian immigrant's desperate journey to find her personal freedom.</b> <p/>It's unprecedented even in the twenty-first century for a young Sicilian woman to defy the centuries-old mandate Family is everything!--but twenty-two-year-old Mariella Russo is desperate to escape Sicily. She's being relentlessly coerced into an engagement with her wealthy college sweetheart--a young man from a prominent powerful family--by her envious and erratic mother who hopes the match will increase her own ignominious social status. Suddenly Mariella's lifelong home has become a claustrophobic island. In a bid for independence and an attempt to escape entrapment she flees to San Francisco. <p/>But Mariella's bête noire--entrapment--follows her to San Francisco where everyone wants more from her than she wants to give. Her American roommate Leslie turns out to be a gay man rather than the woman she imagined; her employer/lover is pressuring her to live with him; and her neurotic mother is haunting her wreaking havoc and embarrassment. An urgent return trip to Sicily puts Mariella to the ultimate challenge: will she submit to tradition or choose a life she wants for herself?