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I Love You Like a Tomato
Marie Giordano. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0312424078. 240 pages.
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Yes, you can pick up this mass-market paperback in the magazine aisle at Walgreens (or you could circa Summer of 2004, anyway). But don't let that fool you. I Love You like a Tomato is seriously good literary fiction, as unique and delightful as its title suggests. ChiChi Maggiordino has made the treacherous journey from Italy to America with her mother, grandmother, and very sick little brother Marco. The family is expecting to stay with their American grandparents, awaiting the return of the American soldier ChiChi's mother married in 1944. Unfortunately, this plan doesn't work out as they had hoped, since the aforementioned American soldier's family has absolutely no idea what's about to arrive on their doorstep. As the family struggles with debilitating poverty, and Marco grows sicker and sicker, ChiChi becomes impatient with her mother's efforts to "be making a plan of her brain" and takes things into her own hands. So long as she performs a hundred magical rituals - walking backwards everywhere she goes, fasting for forty days, tapping her toe a hundred times under the table, hopping on one foot for the day, and so forth - she will keep her darling brother safe and her fragile family together. As ChiChi begins growing up in 1950s America, her fervent quest to find her place in a foreign culture is reminiscent of Rita Mae Brown's main character in Rubyfruit Jungle (in this case, an Italian-American outsider instead of a Lesbian-American outsider). There's something, that is, about Marie Giordono's writing that is just that good, just that distinctive and nuanced. And that doesn't even address how incredibly fun this book is to read. GBL's Ellen Moore admits she consumed it twice through, back-to-back, in one week, and wants Marie Giordano to know she is VERY ANXIOUSLY awaiting the next book in the promised trilogy about the Maggiordino family.
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