Corona shines when showing musicians at work, especially through secondary characters both real (opera star Anna Giro) and imagined (violin teacher Silvia the Rat). Fans of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring will welcome another novel about how a masterpiece is created. According to Corona, women like the orphaned sisters inspired the fervor and brilliance of Vivaldi's music.
Vivaldi represses his romantic feeling for Maddalena and instead writes concert pieces into which they can both put their hearts. Dark, quiet Maddalena remains in the shadows until she takes up the violin, and a controversial musician and cleric, Antonio Vivaldi, becomes her teacher. Groomed for the Piet 's renowned music academy, Chiaretta, with her pretty blonde looks and beautiful voice, earns a place as celebrated soloist and marriage to an aristocrat.
In 1695, three-year-old Maddalena and her infant sister, Chiaretta, are abandoned on the doorstep of Venice's Piet foundling hospital. Lately, i have been enjoying the opportunity to serve as an enrichment lecturer on Silversea Cruises, and in my spare time, I am an avid tennis player, novice golfer, voracious reader, and a pretty good chef.The music students who inspired Vivaldi and the city where they performed the great composer's works come to life in Corona's adult fiction debut. I also freelanced in the 1990s, writing approximately 20 Young Adult titles for Lucent Books. I came to San Diego City College in 1990, first as a dean and then as a full-time professor of English and Humanities. Professionally, early in my career I was both an instructor and an administrator of academic support programs at San Diego State University and the University of California at San Diego. The Iliad, The Odyssey, and other Greek myths inform and enrich Corona's (The Four Seasons) fanciful first-millennium tapestry of Xanthe, the daughter of Odysseus, king of the Cephallenians. Graduate school at the University of Chicago (MA 1972) and again at Davis (Ph.D, 1982) followed. I couldn't believe I could get a degree by devouring novels and poetry in bed in my pajamas, and writing papers on ideas that burned in me as I read, but it turned out to be largely true.
As a result, by the time I graduated from The Bishop's School in 1967 and enrolled as an English major at the University of California at Davis, I had come to appreciate that good writing is extraordinarily difficult but well worth the effort. I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me from the beginning, and who showed their support by giving up much of what they must have wanted for themselves so my sister and I could get the best possible education. My first publications were in the Oakland Tribune in a weekly section for children called "Aunt Elsie's Page," and a newspaper I put out for my family which featured reviews of what I was reading and news about what was happening in the lives of my dolls.
I have loved reading and writing ever since my older sister came home from first grade to teach me what she had learned that day.
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