Seventeen-year-old Lucie Santoro has done the unthinkable: she has graduated high school — the first Santoro daughter to do so.
In the tightly bound Italian immigrant community of East Harlem, where a daughter’s future is decided by fathers over espresso and daughters are expected to marry well and keep house, Lucie dares to imagine something more. Standing on that graduation stage, diploma in hand, she says it aloud for the first time: she wants to become a teacher.
The words, once spoken, cannot be taken back.
At home, her mother — a woman who crossed an ocean for a better life yet clings to Old World customs with iron determination — sees only danger in Lucie’s ambition. Her father walks the fragile line between assimilation and heritage. Carlo Colucci, kind and steady and already chosen for her, offers safety, family honor, and a future mapped out in advance. He is not a villain. That makes it harder.
And beyond the narrow streets of East Harlem, a different world beckons — reshaped by the Great War, charged by women newly granted the right to vote, and full of possibilities that no one in Lucie’s family has dared to name.
As Lucie begins to understand that history is shifting, she must decide whether to shift with it — and what it will cost her if she does.
Rich with the textures of Italian-American life — crowded tenement kitchens, whispered gossip from fire escapes, the bells of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the weight of a mother’s silence — Book One: The Promise Trilogy is a story about mothers and daughters, inherited dreams and chosen destinies, and the first, irreversible act of becoming yourself.
Who are we allowed to become — and what must we risk to find out?
For readers of Adriana Trigiani and Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn — immigrant coming-of-age stories steeped in family obligation, where quiet rebellion carries the weight of an ocean crossing and a mother’s sacrifice.
Why would Lucie leave? Sherilyn Decter on the question that pulled a supporting character out of another series and gave her a trilogy of her own.
The world of 1919 East Harlem was real. Explore the history behind Lucie’s story → The Cost of Becoming
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