Teaser Tuesday: Before the Earthquake
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• On your blog or other social media, share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! Everyone loves Teaser Tuesday. Post a link at www.ThePurpleBooker.com/ as a response to the week's Teaser Tuesday.
I'm reading Before the Earthquake, by Maria Allen. The novel is set in the south of Italy in the early part of the 20th century, in the aftermath of an earthquake that damaged 15-year-old Concetta's village.
My family is Italian, and the following passage reminds me of a story of my father's childhood in an immigrant community in northeastern Pennsylvania. When he was sick, his mother would sometimes bring him to a woman he called the "Italian witch doctor," whose treatments were similar to the one Concetta's mom uses on her in this book.
This teaser is on page 41, and takes place when Concetta, who was badly injured in the earthquake and remembers very little of the weeks before it, thinks she feels something moving inside her.
" 'Evil,' her mother said. 'Lu maluocchi. The evil eye.' When someone was watching you, when someone was hoping that harm might befall you, when someone was wishing it so much that it did in fact happen to you, that was when they said you have 'the evil eye.'"
― Before the Earthquake
by Maria Allen