Product Description

Driven by fear of her encroaching death, an elderly woman writes a letter to her granddaughter, in the shape of a diary. Part love-letter and part confession, it is above all a bequest of advice for life from a woman at last brave enough to acknowledge that she has too long repressed her feelings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #283446 in Books
• Published on: 1996-07-29
• Original language: Italian
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
This wan roman, whose hortatory pleading never rises beyond the level of "Know Thyself," is an obvious entry in the Having Our Say/Bridges of Madison County sweepstakes. It comprises a serial letter of advice, written between one mid-November and Christmas, by Olga, an old Italian woman, for her fugitive granddaughter in America. In it, Olga describes her own thwarted intellectual hunger, unhappy marriage, gratifying adultery, and traumatic loss of her only daughter - all the while admonishing the daughter's daughter to be her own woman (which, essentially, she's already doing). The best that can be said for this sententious offertory of feminine wisdom is that it's smoothly written and translated and its bromides go down easily. Follow Your Heart won Italy's Premio Donna Citta di Roma in 1994. Che sara sara. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Driven by fear of her encroaching death, an elderly woman writes a letter to her granddaughter, in the shape of a diary. Part love-letter and part confession, it is above all a bequest of advice for life from a woman at last brave enough to acknowledge that she has too long repressed her feelings.

Customer Reviews

Appalling piece of tosh
This book takes bad writing to a whole new level. Having listened to the whining, self-pitying, patronizing voice of the grandmother over many interminable pages, one fully understands how the granddaughter ran for miles, probably to keep herself from strangling the old lady. The truisms are piled so high that it is impossible to find one genuine thought.

A magical essay on life, love and destiny
This is a book to be returned to time and time again for some homespun Italian wisdom. Written as a series of letters to her granddaughter, the author eloquently describes her own turbulent life and her thoughts on the nature of human love, the workings of fate and the importance of looking within. As comforting as a bowl of spaghetti without any of the schmaltz sometimes encountered in other semi-spiritual works, this book is truly inspirational and will stay with you forever.

Medicine for the Heart
I have read this book in a period where I was in need of a friendly advice on how to choose my path of life. I found it in this book. It took me a month to read it, only because I found each page to be more magical than the previous one and I did not want to lose that feeling. Tamaro writes superbly , mixing the emotions of three generations of women , in an elequant way. I definetely recommend it to all those women who are in need of a spiritual note in their lives.