The Girl Who Said No

Préface
Bookstore appearances in the San Francisco Bay Area Special events at Italian cultural organizations such as Museo ItaloAmericano and Istituto Italiano di Cultura Promotion through national women's organizations such as NOW Tapping into #MeToo via social media and major media outreach National review attention in women's magazines Publisher and author website promotions Goodreads Giveaway

Auteur
Natalie Galli, a San Francisco native of Italian background, has penned two illustrated children's books for Sunbath Studios: Ciao Meow and Spin The Hound Lost and Found, A Tale of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. She edited a third Sunbath Studios publication: LeeLee The Lizard Wants A Pizza. Her writings have been anthologized in Italy, A Love Story and in four volumes of Travelers' Tales, three of which were awarded gold and silver prizes by the Bay Area Travel Writers. She has worked as an editor and proofreader for Burning Books, as a columnist for The Berkeley Monthly, and as a freelance contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Texte du rabat

In a timely account at this moment in the #MeToo movement, author Natalie Galli, of Sicilian-American heritage, travels on a personal odyssey to find the girl who broke a thousand-year-old Sicilian tradition that allowed kidnap and rape in pursuit of marriage. In the process, Galli uncovers a family secret, encounters the long arm of the Mafia, and discovers new strengths in herself as she successfully completes her quest.

Résumé
An eighteen-year-old woman named Franca Viola made history in 1966 as one of the first #metoo heroines of modern times, when she refused to go along with a centuries-old forcible marriage custom in Sicily. Having endured kidnap and rape, she publicly defied the expectation that she would marry the rapist to restore her broken honor. A social uproar occurred throughout the island and beyond. In Natalie Galli's The Girl Who Said No, Viola's remarkable story unfolds when the author arrives in Palermo to search for this brave heroine, with little more than the memory of a tiny article she had spotted two decades prior. Galli wanted to know: whatever had become of this courageous girl who had overturned an ancient, entrenched tradition? The riveting events after Franca pressed charges with the police form the core of this gripping memoir. Viola was subjected to public taunting whenever she appeared on the streets of her town; Mafia-orchestrated bullying threatened her entire family. Galli traced the dramatic tale to its conclusion, in spite of initial warnings from her own relatives not to break the Sicilian code of silence. Throughout her search for the enigmatic Franca, Galli shares her own poignant and hilarious observations about a vibrant culture steeped in contradictions and paradoxes. Does she succeed in locating the elusive proto-feminist whose case forever changed Italian culture and history? Travel along on Galli's engaging odyssey to find out.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter I / A Hot Pink Hell1969 When we vaulted the purple-blue Strait of Messina by ferry toward the island of Sicily, home of our southernmost ancestors, and stood on the bright deck in our lightweight American summer clothes that August, the crew surrounded us, curious, chattering, full of questions. My parents came from Contessa Entellina on the Greek-Albanian Plain and from Palermo, my mother answered in Sicilian dialect, emotion brimming in her eyes, and we are returning for the first time. Welcome home, signora! Welcome back. The captain himself came down from the bridge and extended his hand to my father. Congratulations, my American friend. For what? my father asked. For landing on the moon last month. I can't take credit, he laughed, but thank you. To walk on the moon! An achievement we all watched on the television. Sincerely, I salute your great United States. I would like to visit some day. I have cousins in Yonkers. The adults carried on while we three teen-aged sisters leaned on the railing, dazzled by the almost violet color of the Mediterranean, hoping for dolphins. My younger sister Susanna ran ahead to look for them from the prow. "Hey, Louise," my father called out, "you've got the satchel with the passports, right?" My older sister held it up for him. "And gals, first order of business: always notice where the lifeboats are located." He turned back to talk with the Captain. The grown-ups could concern themselves with travel details and safety. What I cared most about on that crossing was the thrill of jumping off the European continent, the spectacular sparkle of the bouncing sea and being seventeen. When I glanced up at herthe island flag of the Trinacriasnapping in the breeze, she nabbed me with a look. Medusa's half-smile was hard to interpret: encircled by her three running legs, her wings, her serpents, her sheaves of wheat, the face teased and dared. Are you ready? she seemed to ask, scrutinizing me. We were about to set foot on an ancient, magical island, with an ancient woman at the center. Captain and crew cheered as our rented Fiat was hoisted off the boat by a creaking rope contraption. The car swung out over our heads. When it bump-landed on the pier and the ropes were pulled away, they all waved and called out safe journey. We headed west into the interior hills, where the twentieth century fell away. Every aged stone village dotting the road or extruding upward from rock outcroppings was shuttered against the blanching late summer light. The sun had long since faded them centuries ago. Surprised by a Fiat with a northern license plate driving through, contadini stopped to tip their caps. Donkeys carried loads bulging out much wider than themselves along the coarse road, their tasseled heads down in the heat. The lulling thump of the tires had us hardly speaking while a remote and rugged landscape revealed itself. From the car we watched old women balanced on their terra-cotta roofs, crushing and spreading bursting ripe tomatoes across broad pallets to dry in the sun. They used wooden paddles as big as oars to tame and smooth flat the fruit of the land into what would become red paste. Up high, with their feet fixed on the roof tiles, they gave an appearance of slowly rowing through red pools of Sicily's agricultural lifeblood. The toil of these women, in black headscarves, dresses and stockings covering everything but their faces and hands, was hard and long under the seared blue sky. Below them, we saw teenaged girls seated just outside their front doors. Facing in, hands folded in their laps, heads bowed and hair banished behind modest pastel scarves, they were forbidden to look at anything but the walls. Encircling female relatives made certain they stayed contained. In village after village we saw this stark sight of the elder black silhouettes perched one story above and the fixed virginal presence at road level. These girls were our ages. While we goofed off in the back seat with the windows down, dousing ourselves from glass water bottles to cool off, barely tolerating the weight of sleeveless cotton shifts on our skinwell, that morning Susanna had put on a hot-pink sundress, with the vee-front and the scooped backthey were covered up to their throats, down to their wrists and over their knees. Not one turned to watch our lone car go by. They were trained against it. We entered the city of Agrigento. My father wanted to get a feel for the centro città before we visited the famous Valley of the Temples that afternoon, so we parked and wandered into a large piazza. Banks of old men sat fused to metal chairs outside their bar, staring at us. A soft sound like a breeze through dried grass sailed across the square, ssss. It seemed like a tone of nature, maybe a light wind picking up, though the air stayed still. The odd noise grew. Ssssssss. A release of ste…