‘Brava, Valentine’ endearing, captivating

  When Valentine Roncalli’s 80-year-old grandmother and mentor, Teodora, leaves the business to move to Italy and get married, she leaves the building and the creative control of the shoe company to Valentine, but to Valentine’s horror, Grandma puts her brother Alfred in charge of the finances. Since she and Alfred get along like chalk and cheese, Valentine is a bit worried. But she has a new shoe line to established and puts aside her worries as she works to find a company that can reasonably manufacture the shoes.
  When she stumbles across an old sketch of a shoe drawn by her great-grandfather’s brother, Valentine unlocks a family secret that had been kept for decades — and that might just be the answer to her prayers. The long-lost relatives lived in Buenos Aires, and they were in the shoe-making business as well. But Valentine is in for a shock when she travels to Argentina to meet her cousins, a shock that could cause the rift between families to grow wider.
  In the midst of the whirl that is her life, Valentine deals with her family’s various marital and health crises, gains a new roommate in her best friend Gabriel who is a redecorating dervish, and wonders about her lack of romantic action. She ponders the possibility of a relationship with Gianluca, the handsome son of her grandmother’s new husband, but the distance and lifestyles between them seem insurmountable despite his declarations of love.
  But possibilities are always promising and if Valentine wants the future she dreams of — both romantically and in her business life — she’s going to have to mature and grab hold of the brass ring as it goes ’round.
  “Brava, Valentine” is the second book in Adriana Trigiani’s trilogy about Valentine Roncalli, her family and their shoe company, and it is just as endearing and captivating as the first book, “Very Valentine.”
  Trigiani, who is know for her best-selling novels “Big Stone Gap,” “The Queen of The Big Time,” and “Lucia, Lucia,” is a master at capturing the heart and soul of family life in her heartwarming stories. Readers feel a connection with her characters, as if they were a part of the big, boisterous Italian families that populate Trigiani’s books. It’s going to be tough having to wait an entire year for “Encore, Valentine” to be released, but you know it will be well worth the anticipation.