In the summer of 1919, in the crowded tenements and cobblestone streets of East Harlem, a seventeen-year-old Italian immigrant daughter does something no Santoro woman has done before: she graduates high school.
For Lucie Santoro, it’s the beginning of everything — and the end of the life her family planned for her.
Set during the volatile months between women’s suffrage and the first Red Scare, The Promise Trilogy follows Lucie across six months that will remake her entirely — from the stifling expectations of an arranged engagement to the dangerous freedom of teaching immigrant workers at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, from the whispered gossip of Pleasant Avenue to the federal raids sweeping through New York’s neighborhoods. This is a story about what happens when a young immigrant woman insists that education is not rebellion — but survival.
It is a story told in three movements: awakening, fracture, and becoming. Each one costs her something she cannot get back. Each one brings her closer to a life built on truth instead of duty.
The World
The Promise Trilogy is set in the vibrant, volatile New York of 1919 — a city still reeling from the Great War, charged by women’s suffrage, and fractured by the first Red Scare. The streets of Italian Harlem pulse with life: pushcart markets and tenement courtyards, the bells of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the spectacle of the Giglio Festival, immigrant gardens tucked behind fire escapes. And beyond East Harlem, the settlement houses of the Lower East Side offer a different kind of education — one that comes with its own dangers.
This is a world where tradition is protection and defiance is exile. Where mothers who crossed an ocean to give their daughters a better life still define “better” by Old World rules. Where a young woman’s decision to become a teacher can fracture a family, a community, and an engagement — all at once.
The Books
Book One — Awakening (June–July 1919) The battle is personal. Lucie Santoro has graduated high school — the first in her family. She dreams of becoming a teacher. Her mother dreams of a wedding. Between obedience and ambition, between Carlo Colucci’s steady certainty and the pull of something larger, Lucie begins to discover who she might become. The cost, at first, is measured in her mother’s silence and her father’s troubled gaze. It will not stay that small.
Book Two — Fracture (August 1919) The battle becomes public. Lucie’s secret life as a teacher at the Henry Street Settlement collides with her approaching wedding, and when scandal erupts at the Giglio Festival, the judgment is no longer Mamma’s alone — it belongs to all of East Harlem. The parish whispers. The community closes ranks. And the teaching career Lucie has barely begun is threatened before it can take root. To claim her own life, she must break an engagement that binds two families and withstand the weight of an entire neighborhood’s disapproval.
Book Three — Becoming (September–November 1919) The battle becomes survival. Lucie has chosen truth over protection, but 1919 New York is no place for an unprotected woman with dangerous convictions. Federal raids sweep through immigrant neighborhoods. Students disappear. Henry Street is shut down, and the classroom that gave her purpose becomes a flu ward of cots and coughing bodies. The stakes are no longer reputation or family harmony — they are deportation, physical violence, and the lives of people who trusted her.
But Lucie doesn’t retreat. She builds. A women’s auxiliary forms in tenement kitchens and moves to a waterfront warehouse. Italian, Polish, Russian, Jewish, Irish women work side by side — running supply lines, medical cooperatives, rent strikes, emergency funds. Lucie coordinates, strategizes, and ultimately stands on a platform at Pier 54 on Thanksgiving morning, speaking to five thousand voices in four languages, with federal agents recording every word.
Who do you become when you can no longer return to who you were? Lucie Santoro becomes an answer.
For Readers Of
If you love historical fiction that puts women at the center of history’s turning points — novels where the personal and the political are inseparable — The Promise Trilogy belongs on your shelf.
Readers of Adriana Trigiani will recognize the warmth and tension of Italian-American family life, the pull between Old World loyalty and New World possibility. Readers of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn will find the same quiet, devastating interiority of an immigrant woman remaking herself — but with sharper political stakes. Those drawn to Kristin Hannah’s stories of ordinary women finding extraordinary courage in times of upheaval will find that same emotional architecture here, grounded in the specific textures of 1919 East Harlem. And readers of Christina Baker Kline and Lisa Wingate — who understand what happens when vulnerable women confront institutional power — will find Book Three unforgettable.
The Promise Trilogy is set in one of the most turbulent years in American history. Explore the real stories behind the fiction → The Cost of Becoming
Long before she became Delores’s sharp-eyed ally in the Moonshiner Mysteries, Lucie Santoro learned what it cost to stand her ground. The Promise Trilogy is her origin story.
The story behind the trilogy — why a first-generation Italian daughter walked away from everything she was raised to be, and what it cost her.
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