Christina Marrocco

Author and Poet

Addio, Love Monster

by Christina Marrocco

Genres: Mid-Century Fiction, Family Stories, Trauma Exploration, Immigrant Life, Roman a Clef

Addio Love Monster is a novel told in linked stories spanning generations on the "regular" yet remarkable Singer Street of fictional midcentury Mulberry Park, just outside of Chicago. Marrocco transports you fully into this small world where Signora Giuseppa, the "iron fist" of Singer Street, does everything it takes to keep her grown children very near her, no matter what. Where Enrico the widower creeps in the night looking for a new wife in all the wrong places. Where Nicky the golden gloves boxer wrestles with what he saw in the basement as a child--and Lena, his wife, also wrestles--with how to deal with Nicky's violence. Each story follows one person, but together they are the story of the neighborhood, a neighborhood that faces life together, whether they like it or not. In these pages you will find humor and sorrow, resentment and adoration, and the churn and change of a neighborhood where everyone knows everyone both too much and too little as time marches on.

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Reviews:

"In rich, descriptive prose peppered with salty dialogue, Christina Marrocco gives us a penetrating look at several generations of a Sicilian immigrant family. Bookmarked on either end of this novel in stories are two tales focusing upon professional mourner and matriarch Giuseppa Millefiore, who teaches her family that “everything dies”—but not before the entire clan loves, laughs, and dips deep into the gusto that characterizes Italian-American life."
- Rita Ciresi, author of Pink Slip and Sometimes I Dream in Italian
"Joyce had his Dublin, Ferrante, her Naples, and for Marrocco it’s Mulberry Park, where not much seems to happen, and yet something’s always going on if you look beneath the surface. Marrocco finds the extraordinary in the lives of the folk who inhabit this sleepy suburb of Chicago, creating stories of individuals that she forms into a lively word tapestry, capturing days of lives gone by, reminding us that everyone has a story to tell."
- Fred L. Gardaphé, author of From Wise Guys to Wise Men
"In Addio, Love Monster, Christina Marrocco has created a world that pulses with life. At the center of that life is the Millefiore family and their iron-fisted matriarch, Giuseppa. Set in fictional Mulberry Park, a suburb of Chicago, on the largely Sicilian-settled Singer Street, Marrocco’s novel-in-stories creates a place that is both familiar and wonderfully strange, a slice of a past time where families and neighbors squabble and gossip and judge, but most of all, they share a love that outstrips those lesser emotions. A wonderful first book by an author with a keen eye and a skillful touch."
- Patrick Parks, author of Tucumcari
"With a unique and captivating voice and astounding attention to details, Christina Marrocco immerses us in the lives of a multi-generational immigrant family with her debut novel. I know well, these people of Mulberry Park, her fictional, working class, Sicilian-American neighborhood near Chicago. In this sharply focused snapshot of the midcentury Southern Italian immigrant experience, Marrocco populates Addio, Love Monster with people as real as it gets. I love this book."
- Karen Tintori, author of Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family