Becoming Mariella

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For fans of Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults and Jean Kwok's Girl in Translation comes a contemporary coming-of-age tale about a young Italian immigrant's desperate journey to find her personal freedom. 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. But Mariella's bête noire—entrapment—follows her to San Francisco, where everyone wants more from her