About this item
In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut. Smith seamlessly combines a memoir whose intimacy matches that of Angela's Ashes with the tale of a community plagued by a malevolent predator that holds the emotional and cultural resonance of The Lovely Bones. Smith's Hartford neighborhood is small-town America, where everyone's door is unlocked and the school, church, library, drugstore, 5 & 10, grocery, and tavern are all within walking distance. Her family is peopled with memorable characters -- her possibly psychic mother who's always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, her adoring father who makes sure she has something to eat in the morning beyond her usual gulp of Hershey's syrup, her grandfather who teaches her to bash in the heads of the eels they catch on Long Island Sound, Uncle Guido who makes the annual bagna cauda, and the numerous aunts and cousins who parade through her life with love and food and endless stories of the old days.
About the Author
I have lived all my life in Connecticut except for the two years I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. Presently, I write from my crow's nest in East Haven, breaking periodically to ride the rails from New Haven to New York where I do enjoy the city lights. I have two children, Jene, an RN at Yale-New Haven's clinics, and Jere, who has had a blog since 2004: A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory (http://letsgosox.blogspot.com) Not only does he cover Red Sox lore and stats, he reviews my books--when he's not co-writing them with me i.e. DIRTY WATER: A RED SOX MYSTERY.
