Granny Torrelli Makes Soup

And that’s just for starters. This Mama can make pasta for main course. And she’ll mend friendships for dessert.

Twelvesomethings Rosie and Bailey are bestest buddies and neighbours. But recently things haven’t been going well for them – at least as far as Rosie is concerned. And so, when simpering Janine moves next door, skinny Rosie fears that her special friendship with her ‘friend-who’s-a-boy’ Bailey will not last. In contrast to the literally blind Bailey, it is the metaphorically myopic Rosie who fails to ‘see’ the truth.

Over soup (section 1), and later pasta-production (section 2), Granny T calms down then counsels the agitato Rosie, who narrates the novel in a breathless present historic. Taking multi-tasking to new heights, she is not only able to serve up some fine Italian cooking, but is also able to get Rosie to see sense, in part at least by sharing her own memories of childhood relationships, which chime with her grandchild’s. Like Rosie, she too had a special friend. Like Rosie, she had a potential rival to that friendship. And, like Rosie, she too felt a (green-eyed) ‘tiger’ of resentment that a cherished friendship was, in her eyes, under threat.

Dominating this slim book is Italian-American Granny Torrelli, with her cheery vernacular laced with tooty-fruity Italian exclamations (always in excitable italics) and an enviable propensity to spoon out good ol’ common sense. Creechily upbeat and wholesome, this simple but life-affirming story will warm the cockles.