A coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of the irrepressible Christina, whose encounters with Catholic school nuns, Italian mothers, and small-town Massachusetts will have readers laughing out loud, even when Christina isn’t . . .

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“Christina the Astonishing is a wonderful book, the funniest I’ve read in a long time, though there’s a lot of melancholy in it as well. All the Catholic lore is hilarious, and the portrait of Italian immigrant life is too . . . Leone writes so well about the awkwardness of adolescent sex and romance.”
—Tom Perrotta, author of Tracy Flick Can’t Win

“As hilarious as David Sedaris and mental in the best possible way, Christina has just become my higher power.”
—Jennifer Belle, author of Swanna in Love

“A magnificent time machine that rockets you back to 1960s Boston, suits you up in a little plaid skirt, and drops you into the sights, sounds, and smells of Catholic school and its many horrors and occasional ecstatic (and forbidden) joys. I’ve read Leone’s two wonderful nonfiction books, but this putative ‘fictional’ book is as true as writing gets.”
—Rob Delaney, author of A Heart that Works

“An awkward, spiky Italian American teen navigates family chaos, Catholic school, and misogyny in 1960s Boston, with brio . . . [T]his brash, witty, slice-of-life book is a feast. Think Adriana Trigiani writing with a sharpened nib, and pray to your own saints that we’ll read more from Leone soon.”
—Kirkus Reviews

CHRISTINA FALCONE IS A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD EIGHTH GRADER at Precious Blood Junior High. She is growing up pazza according to her Italian immigrant mother, Rita, who curses a country that poisons children with chocolate milk and singing mice on television. The nuns at Precious Blood are giving Christina nightmares and facial tics with their daily descriptions of torture and martyrdom. All she wanted as a fourth grader was to become a saint so she could be God’s best friend and go straight to heaven and avoid burning in hell for all eternity.

At thirteen, though, Christina’s nightmares about eyeless martyrs have become dreams of escaping this place where she can see the entire trajectory of her life looming before her in a never-ending hamster loop that goes from Precious Blood Elementary School to La Sposa Bridal Shoppe and eventually across the street to Carmello’s Funeral Home without ever leaving her neighborhood only seven miles from Boston. But Harvard Square beckons and Christina’s window to the world cracks open, along with the entire American culture of the 1960s, as she grows from girl to woman. Christina the Astonishing is an endearing look at an irrepressible character that will ring true to all readers regardless of the time or place they happened to take the roller-coaster ride to adulthood.

Akashic Books, Ltd.
240 pages
5.2 x 1 x 8.4 inches

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Author’s Statement

Christina the Astonishing and I have a lot in common: I am a first-generation daughter of Italian immigrants, and I attended a parochial school from kindergarten until my senior year of high school, and I also grew up in a working-class community seven miles outside of Boston. Like Christina, I pursued acting as a career and eventually landed a recurring role on The Sopranos after putting in the required years of humiliation and starvation in New York City. It may have been my time on that series that made me think about coming up in a character-rich environment with a tiny enclave of people from the same mountain village in Italy and a wildly dramatic and inadvertently hilarious family. I wanted to write about growing up in that juicy realm. And, of course, about being desperate to escape it.

I loved writing this coming-of-age novel, even if reliving the days of being a parochial-school prisoner overseen by the Little Sisters of Sadism made me quiver at times with retro-anxiety. Acting and writing spring from the same source, which is all about telling the truth. Writing gives you the chance to reexperience that first shuddery kiss, even when you are way past ingenue as an actor; and in that same way, writing also gives you the thrill of time-traveling as another person.

I do try not to obsess over the significance of being cast five times as a nun in my acting career, though. And what this means in terms of karma. But it yielded a chapter in this novel called “The Inevitable Nun,” and I enjoyed writing that. After three memoirs, this is my first deep dive into fiction. I think I’ll stay here for a while, only surfacing to write broadsides when needed.
—Marianne Leone