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She knew where she wanted to live. Who she wanted to be would take considerably more work.
 

At six years old, Isabella Banks falls in love with Italy. It offers everything her world in Nashville seems to lack: beauty, belonging, and the possibility that she might be extraordinary exactly as she is. It also offers Giancarlo, a boy who becomes a rather significant part of her long-term planning. He has not necessarily been consulted.
 

As Izzy grows up, Italy becomes the place where she feels most like herself. Back home, she navigates the bruising business of adolescence, other people’s expectations, and a persistent suspicion that everyone else received instructions she somehow missed. In Italy, she is bella. Being called beautiful does not solve everything, but she is willing to give it considerable responsibility.
 

By the time she arrives in Florence as a young woman, she has spent years imagining the life waiting for her. Surely a country she loves this much, and a man she has wanted this long, can help her become the woman she is supposed to be.

Then the life she imagined stops cooperating.
 

What follows is a series of choices made with enormous conviction and occasionally limited information. Desire becomes tangled with belonging. Reinvention looks suspiciously like escape. And Izzy discovers how difficult it is to recognize what she needs when she has already delivered several persuasive speeches about what she wants.
 

Moving from Nashville to Tuscany, Florence, and Milan, The Geography of Becoming is a funny, intimate, emotionally candid novel about first love, family, longing, and the considerable distance between appearing certain and knowing yourself.

Izzy can recognize a beautiful pair of shoes immediately. Recognizing a life that fits takes longer.
 

For anyone who had a plan for her life...right up until life looked at your itinerary, laughed and went completely off course. This is a story about the messy, deeply human business of becoming yourself.
 

Some journeys begin with a plan. Izzy’s comes with luggage, strong opinions, and several people suggesting she reconsider.