Amazon.com Review
Martha McPhee's
L'America is a sweeping tale of transatlantic love, anger, tragedy, and reconciliation, told from both personal and historical perspectives. At the novel's core is an epic romance between an idealistic American and a pragmatic Italian, each of whom possess qualities that both repel and attract the other. The result is a journey through the lives and times of two people for whom an imperfect love will become the driving force for their entire past, present, and future.
Eighteen-year-old Beth arrives in Europe with a naiveté that is matched only by her bravado. The daughter of an aging hippie who runs a commune in memory of his dead wife, Beth is determined to explore the world her father so vehemently eschews. Cesare is a young Italian whose family history is deeply rooted in traditions that seem unbreakable. When they meet on a small Greek island, they are immediately drawn to the sense of "otherness" they see in each other. As their bond deepens, so do the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that keep preventing them from living happily ever after. But still, "What they wanted was to live something unlivable, step inside the lost chance."
McPhee is an extremely talented writer, and her detailed descriptions of sun-soaked Grecian beaches, overstuffed yet cozy New York apartments, and wide open Pennsylvanian orchards are as emotionally charged as her explorations of irrepressible love and cataclysmic grief. On occasion, her strong narrative voice seems to overpower her characters, but she always knows just when to come back to the raw beauty of Beth and Cesare's story. It is that purity, both of love and of loss, that makes L'America a gorgeous treasure to behold. --Gisele Toueg
From Publishers Weekly
A soft clash of civilizations disrupts romance in this rapturous but socially acute fable of cross-class love. Sojourning in Europe, 18-year-old Beth, raised by her hippie father on a Pennsylvania commune, finds her polar opposite in Cesare, handsome scion of a 500-year-old Italian banking dynasty. For the motherless Beth, Cesare represents the allure of rootedness and gracious traditions. For Cesare, straitjacketed by family, class expectations and a prospective banking career he dreads, Beth represents America's wide-open possibilities, headquartered at her father's egalitarian but entrepreneurial commune, a refuge for dreamers of all stripes seeking to reinvent themselves. Besotted as they are with each other, Beth and Cesare find themselves drawn apart—Cesare back to the comforting confines of his hometown, Beth to New York, where her idea of home is a succession of illegal sublets and where she commercializes her love of Italy by writing cookbooks and starting restaurants. McPhee's lush, erotically charged prose evokes their erotic obsession—and the glamorous Old World locales where it blossoms—but, as in her well-received family sagas
Bright Angel Time and
Gorgeous Lies, McPhee's real subject is the larger forces that shape individual lives and passions.
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