Promo: Poinsettia Girl by Jennifer Wizbowski
Today, I'm delighted to welcome author Jennifer Wizbowski to Ruins & Reading. We're sharing an enticing excerpt from her beautiful novel, Poinsettia Girl. It's well worth checking out. Read on!
Poinsettia Girl is currently on blog tour with The Coffee Pot Book Club. Find other fabulous extracts HERE!
Poinsettia Girl
Although the environment differed from the bakery house, Agata felt a familiar playfulness in it. She let her thoughts wander, and her body moved with exertion instead of forced rigidness: sheets meeting one corner with the next, sides smoothed and creased with her hands. The noise and the movement made her lighter. It would have been easy and not an unhappy way to spend her days, downstairs with women such as these, as she got older. Maybe she should settle on that, staying safe, working with her hands and avoiding the competitiveness and heartache of the musically driven upstairs.
The surprise of the lower-level workrooms came in the subtle interactions with the outside world. The couriers who retrieved the silks from grander houses came to chatter and tell, as well as carry and deliver. They brought the complaints of those customers who wanted their silks done a day earlier than their neighbors and their opinions of them back to the laundry room. The laundry front door, so named by everyone because of its location, which opened right to the laundry room, was a side door on the canal used for all Pietà deliveries, including dry supplies and food. The couriers used small boats to retrieve and drop off their laundry, as did the delivery man, who brought the sapone and other household supplies used in the laundry room, hospital, kitchen, and for bathing. Each time he arrived, he insisted on coming in and carrying the heavy supplies to the storage room.
“Poooooeta!” he called that day from the gondola. It echoed through the open door like the song’s chorus he had been humming on the water minutes before. Agata snuck around the corner to watch the interaction. She could tell he liked to say her name. Poeta giggled, then recovered. Their eyes spoke to each other in a glimmer.
After the man was back on his way, the women downstairs teased Poeta openly as she smoothed her unruly curls against her head.
“He never carries the supplies in for me when you’re not around, Poooeta,” sang another laundress.
Agata heard stories of the women at all levels getting married and wondered how marriage could even be possible when they were closed in. As far as she knew, the women in the laundry room were stuck inside like the foundlings were. Clearly, she still had much to learn about this place, which dictated futures she could not foresee. She saw the flirtatious man walk into the laundry, but did anyone ever walk out of it?
~~~
Venice, 1710
Poinsettia Girl is based on the story of Agata de la Pieta, an orphan musician of the Ospedale de la Pieta.
Ten-year-old Agata's world is shaken at the sudden death of her mother. Left only with her egregious father, a working musician in Venice, her ailing grandmother sends her to the well-known orphanage, hidden from everything she's ever known.
Agata auditions for the conservatory style music school where music is both salvation and spectacle. Hidden behind ornate metal grates, adorned with poinsettias in their hair, the singers are veiled in mystery, their ethereal music drawing noble audiences, including gilded young men who see them as treasures-not only for their sound but as coveted marriage prizes.
Just as she reaches the height of her musical journey, a marriage proposal from someone outside the audience tempts her with the promise of a new life-a return to the old neighborhood she's longed for and a home she barely remembers. Torn between the music that has defined her and the hope of belonging to a family, Agata must confront the most profound question of her life: is her purpose rooted in the music that shaped her, or in the love that might free her?
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