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The House of Serenades Reviewed By Conny Crisalli of Bookpleasures.com
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Conny Withay







Reviewer Conny Withay:Operating her own business in office management since 1991, Conny is an avid reader and volunteers with the elderly playing her designed The Write Word Game. A cum laude graduate with a degree in art living in the Pacific Northwest, she is married with two sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren.

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By Conny Withay
Published on May 31, 2012
 

Author: Lina Simoni

Publisher: Moonleaf Publishing, LLC

ISBN: 978-1-937700-01-0



Follow Here To Purchase The House of Serenades

Author: Lina Simoni

Publisher: Moonleaf Publishing, LLC

ISBN: 978-1-937700-01-0

Is blood really thicker than water or can love conquer all and endure forever? With similarities to a Romeo and Juliet scenario, Lina Simoni addresses this topic in her romantic novel, The House of Serenades.

This three hundred and fourteen page soft cover book has an old mandolin against a dark blue background on the front jacket and the author’s photograph with her two dogs along with a short biography, a paragraph about the book and one review on the back. There were no noticeable grammatical or typographical errors in the casual style writing. No profanity was included but there is incest, infidelity and male/female anatomy discussed that may be unsuitable for a young adult.

The book is a simple love story: can two people from opposite monetary-society class fall and stay in love, even when family members try to tear them apart? Even when that same love can destroy each other?

Based in the early 1900s in Genoa, Italy, the daughter of a rich, high-society lawyer falls in love with a common baker’s son. Her rigid and supposed letter-to-the-law father believes in the hierarchal ranking of the rich verses the lowly poor and demeans women, servants and pheasants. He absolutely refuses his daughter have any contact with the baker’s son by sending her away to a convent after learning of her lost virginity (untrue or not). In addition to his own issues with his wife’s past, his two sons including one with aggressiveness and drunkenness, his confidential doctor that has many secrets of his own, and the Chief of Police trying to figure out who is harassing him, the father makes choices that deem him both questionable and unrespectable in the community. The daughter has to make the hard decision between family and love.

Rich with not only history and cultural layout of the land and society, Simoni brings the feelings of young unrequited love, frustrating anger over rules and beliefs, family embarrassment and self-examination to her characters. It is a page turner where one wants to know “what happens next” in almost every chapter.

Without giving away neither the ending nor the multi-faceted interpersonal dilemmas, it is a truly heartbreaking, realistic and probably very concise story of these types of hidden, secret family situations happening in that era when marriages were arranged, women were abused and repressed and cover-ups on anything immoral abounded. This reader would love to read a sequel as Simoni’s writing style is so comfortable and true to heart.


Follow Here To Purchase The House of Serenades