Rainbow Over a Dark Canal — Kate Gilmore

She was about to spend a year in Venice, the loveliest city in the world, but Robin thought she would die of loneliness and boredom. Her friends were in New York doing everything she loved at the Barton School for Performing Arts, planning their senior play productions, agonizing over recitals, whispering in the wings, gossiping in the Caf, sharing dreams, frustrations and the occasional triumph. In Venice her mother, who was responsible for this wretched trip, was her only friend, and her mother spent all her time in dreary art museums gazing rapturously at paintings by long-dead artists. In Venice it rained, and every time she went out she got lost, and nobody spoke English, and her real friends didn’t write.Amazing how a man—or two!—can change everything. First there was Giuliano, a Venetian nobleman, handsome, urbane, an older man (to say the least), a mentor and friend and, as she was to discover one wild night during Carnevale, so much more! Venice seen through Giuliano’s eyes was irresistibly beautiful and seductive.But there was also Toph, who kept popping in and out of Robin’s life. Contradictory Toph, a gifted painter one day, a teenage tease the next, and finally an antidote to Giuliano. With his hare-brained expeditions and Bohemian lifestyle Toph showed Robin another dimension of the city she was beginning to love.The city of Venice with all its strange enchantments is almost another character in this novel. At first it seems to be a dark metaphor of grief and loss, an adversary to the unhappy girl who rejects its art, its language and her lonely way of life. Then, gradually, the city has its way, and in the end Robin is as sorry to leave as she was to arrive.