Shoemaking protagonist given another chance to resole her love life

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/02/2010 (6068 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brava, Valentine

Adriana Trigiani

HarperCollins, 352 pages, $26

Like any fashion conscious New York City woman, Valentine Roncalli is taken with beautiful shoes.

She adores the stitching, the supple leather, the stacked heels, and the exquisite bows and beads. In fact, she loves shoes so much she devotes herself to the trade of custom shoemaking.

In this genre-defying novel, a followup to her bestselling Very Valentine, New York City writer Adriana Trigiani gives her shoemaking protagonist a second chance at love.

As a strong, career-minded 30-something single woman, Valentine is willing to throw herself headlong into expanding her custom shoe-making business into South America.

Ready to risk her family’s century-old company, she remains desperately afraid of leaping into love with a sexy, older Italian man, despite the romance of his handwritten love letters.

Adding to the complications of a trans-Atlantic romance are some predictable but still fascinating subplots: a gay friend who redecorates her apartment and who is the best husband Valentine never had; a brother’s extramarital affair; a grandmother who has found love and a new life at age 80; a dysfunctional but loving set of siblings and their offspring; wacky but committed parents; the sudden death of a beloved co-worker; and the unexpected onset of maternal instincts.

Through it all, Valentine remains focused on two things: growing her business, and facing her innate reluctance to change her life.

As in her successful Big Stone Gap series, Trigiani allows her leading character to stretch and grow and even make some dumb moves, such as neglecting the sexy Italian boyfriend to concentrate on business on a trip to steamy and sensual Buenos Aires.

But where Big Stone Gap‘s Ave Maria Mulligan is believable and fallible as she navigates later-in-life marriage, raising children and the utter sadness of losing a child, Valentine (or Valentina, as her red-hot Italian tanner Gianluca calls her) is less compelling.

Certainly the bits about shoe making are descriptive, and while a bit dull, they betray the author’s obvious love of footwear production.

Valentine claims she is better at showing her emotions than talking (or writing letters) about them, but somehow her creator fails to do just that when it comes to character development and plot advancement.

Trigiani clutters her narrative with too many overt references to popular culture and its requisite gizmos and jargons. She sets the climax of the novel around Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2010, which is a bit jarring when reading the novel much earlier in the same year.

At places, the book is more movie script than novel, and more business manual than love story.

Fans of Trigiani’s previous books won’t be disappointed with her latest offering, but they may be wondering if she’s lost her edge with this attempt at a very cupid-inspired love story.

Brenda Suderman is a Winnipeg journalist who could be romanced by a pair of custom-built shoes.