Through words and music, Appassionata tells the story of an illicit love affair between immigrants from two cultures, who work in privileged households in a Southern California beach community. What begins as an innocent flirtation, spirals into infatuation, then cascades into destructive passion. It propells the lovers to jeopardize their hard-won jobs and the lives they had so carefully constructed in the United States, ultimately spiraling them into treachery and crime. Structured after Beethoven’s Sonata #23, Opus 57, known as the Appassionata, the novel uses music as a counterpoint to the written word, as the story weaves the lives of the characters together and apart.