On Persephone's Island by Mary Taylor Simeti

Simeti intersperses rich helpings of Sicilian history and culture with mundane events and insight into what motivates the peasants essential to the survival of the family farm. Despite her natural diffidence, she shares personal insights that make On Persephone's Island as compelling as her prose. Simeti feels the isolation of being an expatriate and outsider, although she claims to welcome this perspective when faced with frustration and disgust at the pervading political corruption and corrosive effects of the Mafia on everyday life. Her narrative alternates between Palermo, where her children attend school and her husband Toninno is a professor of agricultural economy, and Bosco, in eastern Sicily, where she shoulders demanding responsibilities on the working farm that has belonged to her husband's family for three generations. The book recounts the events of 1983, the year Simeti turned 42. On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal is the ambivalent love story of an intelligent, complex, and self-reflective woman. Freshly graduated from Radcliffe College after growing up in a distinguished and privileged New York City family, the last thing she expected was to fall in love and marry a Sicilian. Mary Taylor Simeti arrived in Sicily in 1962 to do volunteer work. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Synopsis: An American woman residing in Sicily for the past twenty years portrays the Sicilian landscape and customs-both rural and urban-from the perspectives of both a 'foreigner' and a resident

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On Persephone's Island by Mary Taylor Simeti