An Orphan Musician Finds Her Voice in Venice - an Editorial Review of "Poinsettia Girl"

Book Blurb:

Venice, 1710, Poinsettia Girl is based on the story of Agata de la Pieta, an orphan musician of the Ospedale de la Pieta. Ten-year-old Agata's world is shaken at the sudden death of her mother. Left only with her egregious father, a working musician in Venice, her ailing grandmother sends her to the well-known orphanage, hidden from everything she's ever known. Agata auditions for the conservatory style music school where music is both salvation and spectacle. Hidden behind ornate metal grates, adorned with poinsettias in their hair, the singers are veiled in mystery, their ethereal music drawing noble audiences, including gilded young men who see them as treasures-not only for their sound but as coveted marriage prizes. Just as she reaches the height of her musical journey, a marriage proposal from someone outside the audience tempts her with the promise of a new life-a return to the old neighborhood she's longed for and a home she barely remembers. Torn between the music that has defined her and the hope of belonging to a family, Agata must confront the most profound question of her life: is her purpose rooted in the music that shaped her, or in the love that might free her?

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/bBmF

Author Bio:

Jennifer Wizbowski spent her childhood days lost among the spines of her favorite books. Inspired by the daffodil fields of Wordsworth and the babbling brooks of Shakespeare, she earned her bachelor’s in English literature, a minor in music, and a secondary teaching credential, then wrote freelance for local business journals, taught in classrooms, and authored a Teen and Tween column for a parent magazine—all while raising her family.

As those years ended, she knew it was the right time to pursue her lifelong aspiration of bringing her own books to life. She now devotes herself to illuminating everyday women’s stories often lost in the shadows of history, revealing how they became heroines of their own time and place.

Editorial Review:

TITLE: POINSETTIA GIRL

AUTHOR: JENNIFER WIZBOWSKI

RATING: FIVE STARS and the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

Venice would not be who she is without her music lingering around every narrow calle and corner. The musical ensembles in St. Mark’s Square and the string quartets in private parties and gaming rooms provided the template of sound that lured people to them. Their instruments were the backbone upon which the games, laughter, and gaiety balanced to create an aura that attracted people from around the globe. Opportunities arose daily for musicians to play their instruments and meet their lustful needs, especially during Carnival season. Guilelma imagined Pietro felt connected to those urges and the necessity of indulging them in his Serene City. Pietro lugged his violin like a young child with a toy doll, so he'd be acknowledged as somebody special. 

There is, in Jennifer Wizbowski’s Poinsettia Girl: The Story of Agata della Pietà, a certain tremor—like the faintest vibration of a bow drawn across a violin string—that seems to move beneath each page, reminding us how fragile a young girl’s world can be, how easily it quivers under the touch of memory, music, and silence. One steps into the novel as though crossing the worn threshold of the Ospedale della Pietà itself, hearing, perhaps, the distant rush of Venetian waters, the tolling of some unseen bell, and beneath it all the muffled breath of the girls whose fates are shaped within those pale walls.

It is here, in this curious institution—half convent, half orphanage, wholly devoted to the piercing discipline of music—that Agata’s childhood unfolds. One feels her smallness at first, her slight, shadowed presence in corridors that smell of wax and winter air. The city outside flares with Carnival colours and shifting masks, but inside the Ospedale, time passes with the slow, relentless cadence of repetition: scales rising and falling like tides; rules set down in firm, nun-like strokes; the gentle conspiracies of girls who clutch their secrets as tightly as their rosaries. Venetian society, glittering and chaotic beyond the barred windows, presses faintly against the narrative, a reminder of the world that praises beauty even as it binds the hands that create it.

Agata could no longer see; the tears came in a rush and blurred her vision. “Not that song. I cannot sing. I cannot sing.” A heat spread across her chest, pulsating and expanding until she thought it might explode inside of her. Feeling a sudden urgency to flee, she ran outside the choir room, not knowing where to go. Her instincts told her to hide. She couldn’t return to her bed; the room would be full of her bedmates tucked in for the afternoon rest hour. They’d stare if she walked in with a face full of tears. She ran down the stairs and through the chapel doors. She rushed in until reaching a few rows from the back and then crawled onto the floor. She made her body as small as she could, a little ball, and then found the knee rest from the pew pushed against it with her back. She folded her dress until a wrinkle lifted and rubbed her finger over the fabric. She closed her eyes. The pulsing eased. She could hear her breath again. 

Agata herself appears with the stillness of a candle-flame in a draught. One grows fond of her—not because she seeks our affection, but because she so gently resists it. Her silence becomes a kind of sanctuary; she will not sing, she cannot, for fear that the sound might loosen the last precious thread that binds her to her mother’s voice. How delicately the author renders this refusal, this clinging to memory as though it were a fragile blossom cupped in the palm. Yet something stirs within her—music, that ancient tide—and when it rises, when it claims her, she is transformed. What begins as reluctance becomes an awakening; her voice, once buried in grief, emerges shimmering and tremulous, revealing the strange, luminous power of art to shore up the ruins of the heart.

Around her stand figures who move as though cast in varying shades of light and shadow. Candida, warm and companionable, leans close like a sister murmuring confidences in the night. The Madonna, compassionate yet distant, presides over the girls with an authority softened by a human ache one senses only in brief flickers. Signora Prudenza, all rigid lines and unbending glare, sharpens the air wherever she steps, while Maestra Elena offers a gentler cadence—her guidance falling over Agata like sunlight through high windows. Even Margarita, discreet and self-effacing, carries within her a quiet generosity, a reminder that kindness often flourishes in the least expected corners. And hovering on the edge of the story, like a bird alighting briefly on a windowsill before the choir begins, is Antonio Vivaldi—his presence faint yet unmistakably transformative.

But the novel’s loveliness does not shy away from the darkness that laps at its edges. There are passages here—honest, unsettling, written with the tact of a hand that knows the weight of suffering—in which the reader must walk beside Agata through the dimmest chambers of childhood: emotional neglect, violence, violations of trust. The prose neither turns away nor lingers cruelly; it observes with clarity, allowing us to feel the cold stone beneath Agata’s feet, the invisible bruises carried within her mind, the loss of her mother echoing like a hollow note struck again and again. The abandonment she attributes to her Nonna becomes another wound, tender and unhealed. One senses her isolation—the starkness of the Ospedale, its discipline as rigid as the winter sea—and understands how deeply she aches for warmth, for remembrance, for the faint reassurance that she has not been wholly forgotten.

Agata thumbed through the stack of music. Exercises for the introductory string class. A new orchestration on a melody meant to feature a mezzo voice. Her fingers stopped when she spotted a handwritten note: for Agata. She glanced at the top right to see who the composer was and drew a breath of humble disbelief when she saw the name A. Vivaldi, whom she formerly referred to as the man in the red jacket. Agata had learned that though he was the fastest-producing composer, Maestro Vivaldi was awkward and skittish to deal with. She also heard that the board had a complicated relationship with him. He scored a vast amount of the Pietà’s music and served as a violin teacher, but the board never invited him to be Maestri do Coro. While he had produced sweeping pieces like Gloria in D and Juditha triumphans, most of Vivaldi’s compositions were smaller-scale songs, many written for Anna Maria, whom he had composed over twenty concertos, and even a few lately were for Chiaretta. Agata took a closer look at the page with her name on it. It was a short vocal piece intended for a soprano voice, consisting of three verses. There was no orchestration included with it. But he evidently meant for her to see that it had been written for her.

The spaces she inhabits are rendered with painterly detail: the practice hall, where each note clings to the rafters as though unwilling to fade; the narrow dormitories with their rows of small beds, each one a vessel holding a girl’s private longing; the oppressive rituals of rehearsal and audition, which press upon the students until even their sighs seem measured and weighed. And yet, in these very confines, something like freedom trembles—a paradox only a musician might understand. The convent becomes at once cage and chrysalis, a place of forbidding rules that nevertheless nurtures the fragile wings of their aspirations. Within this tension lies the novel’s deepest beauty.

Wizbowski’s prose drifts easily between the concrete and the dreamlike, between the outer strictures of Venetian life and the inner tremors of a girl learning to inhabit her own voice. One finds oneself carried along as if on a slow-moving canal boat, watching the shifting gleam of water and shadow, listening for the faint, persistent music that threads through Agata’s story.

It is a book that lingers. It is a book that, once opened, seems to breathe.

And it is, without hesitation, a book one should read.

Award:

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