tiny pink books

Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta
Penguin Books Australia, 1992

Josephine Alibrandi is a smart, sassy seventeen year old, living in Sydney during her last year of high school.  She’s got a lot to think about this year, as she struggles with her identity as an Australian-Italian, her first boyfriend, her relationships with her mother and grandmother, and meeting her absentee father for the first time in her life.  There’s a lot of heavy issues in this coming of age novel, but if I had to put my finger on the biggest one to Josephine is the idea of balancing two cultural identities.

While the characters in this book are universally appealing, especially headstrong Josephine, I think it may be more enjoyable to adults than teens at this point.  It’s very much dated in the early 90’s and, perhaps at least here in America, the concept of an Italian struggling to fit in, culturally, seems a ghost of the past.  Still, this was a satisfying read that was hard to put down in the end.  I’m not sure who I’d recommend this one to, other than librarians and readers who liked Marchetta’s other novels.