“I enjoyed the company of tequila-drinking, bubblegum-chewing, dancing Lavinia, the laundress, who took me on a no-tech tour of San Francisco, getting her hands into clients’ dirty laundry and cleansing family secrets, including her own. Sapienza elicits sympathy for her Italian immigrant heroine, who has more ups and downs than San Francisco has hills but whose travails and travels left me happy and hungry for Mexican food and espresso.”
—ANN LUDWIG, freelance travel writer for The New York Times
“Spirited, quirky, and independent Lavinia Lavinia makes a life as a laundress in San Francisco. But she feels a painful void: her family history and identity have been kept from her. As we follow her, the mystery slowly unravels, with the help of friendship, love, and adventure.”
—PATRICIA STEENLAND, College Writing Programs, UC Berkeley
“Barbara Sapienza draws the reader into the life of Lavinia Lavinia, providing a blueprint for living and prevailing in the modern world of the twenty-first century.”
—JOHN D BREDEHOEFT, PhD, member of the National Academy of Engineering
“Set in the aliveness of the city of San Franciso, The Laundress gives us a story of the power of love and forgiveness to break open the human heart, healing the wounds within the self and within others.”
—CHERYL KRAUTER, MFT, author of Surviving the Storm: A Workbook for Telling Your Cancer Story
“Written from the heart and spiced with swirling dance, chiming clocks, steaming tamales, sculpted clay, and double espressos, The Laundress tells a beautiful story of lost family and the healing power of friendship. A rich and rewarding read.”
—DIANNE ROMAIN, author of The Trumpet Lesson
“Sapienza weaves a tapestry of Old World customs with New Age therapies, cityscape with wilderness, and festering wounds with blossoming love that dances to life on the page.”
—SHARMON J. HILFINGER, author of Arctic Requiem: The Story of Luke Cole and Kivalina
“Barbara Sapienza is masterful at creating a powerful story of a yearning daughter driven to know her distant father—not easy, as Lavinia was snatched away from Naples as a baby and brought to San Francisco, creating a chasm of time and place. Readers are not only swept into a passionate pursuit of reunion but by the author’s extraordinary skill at sustaining mystery until we are dazzled by surprise—the best kind.”
—JOAN MINNINGER, PhD, author of The Father/Daughter Dance