She’s scrappy. She’s stubborn. She’s sexy. She’s sentimental (but don’t tell her that). And she’s a stellar cook.

Meet Belladonna Marie Donato, the teenage star of Portland writer David Ciminello’s sensual romp of a novel, The Queen of Steeplechase Park, published in May by Portland-based Forest Avenue Press. The second daughter and middle child of Italian immigrants in 1930s New York City, Bella is their most American child, the one who goes boldly where no Donato has gone before. 

By the time Bella turns 18, she’s fallen in lusty love, had a baby, worked as a burlesque dancer, married a mobster, and become famous for her cooking. She’s also spent plenty of time on the fringes of society, where she’s formed familial bonds with all sorts of people who’ve been overlooked or scorned. “It’s really important for me as an artist, in general, to champion the underdog, to champion those that are in any way marginalized, outcast, or despised,” Ciminello said.

Ciminello tells Bella’s story in delicious bite-sized chapters, interwoven with recipes for tomato gravy, meatballs, lasagna, risotto, gnocchi, stuffed clams, and other delectable Italian dishes. He’ll discuss The Queen of Steeplechase Park with fellow Forest Avenue Press author Stevan Allred on Oct. 3 at Annie Bloom’s Books in Southwest Portland.

Here are five things to know about The Queen of Steeplechase Park, drawn from a recent conversation with Ciminello.

1. The book was inspired by a family member. 

As a child in New Jersey, about 20 miles northwest of Manhattan – “very much in Bella country,” Ciminello said – he regularly watched late-afternoon movies on TV. One day he and his mother watched the film adaptation of the musical Gypsy. After its You Gotta Have a Gimmick number featuring three strippers, she told him that her aunt had been a burlesque performer at Coney Island.

“And it made perfect sense to me,” Ciminello said. “She would blow into town like a hurricane and she was this audacious, bombastic woman who was, like, a 38 triple D, very proudly.”

“Everything was about her, and everything was hyperbolic, and she would have the family in stitches,” Ciminello recalled. “I was fascinated by her.”

He added, “As a kid who grew up queer, as a kid who often felt marginalized and outcast, she became this sort of mythic heroine to me. … She was going to be who she was, and she didn’t care what people said or what people thought.”

2. The book draws heavily on the flavors of Ciminello’s childhood.

Amid bullying, Ciminello found solace in family and food, he said. His mother learned to cook at a nearby Italian market – a story he gave to Bella – and his grandmothers and great-aunt also were accomplished cooks. 

“I grew up with the best chicken parmesan, the best eggplant parmesan, the best of everything, particularly in terms of Italian-American food and Portuguese food,” he said. (He’s of Italian and Portuguese descent.) ”It was all made from scratch and all so delicious.”

About 80 percent of the recipes in the novel are dishes he grew up with, he said. The rest he researched to serve the plot, such as a recipe for a cannoli cake. 

3. The most fun characters to write were Bella, her little brother, and her best friend.

“Of course Bella, because she is the fearless leader of our story,” Ciminello said.

Then there’s Luigi, the baby she raises after their mother turns her back on parenting. “He was a chip off the old Bella for me,” Ciminello said. “He was fearless and pugnacious, a little bit of a wily character and extremely charming. So I had a real soft spot for him.”

And there’s Terelli Lombardi, whom Bella first sees on a streetcar being studiously ignored by the other passengers, a “young Nancy boy with a pound of sugar in his pants.” The two quickly become inseparable. “I love his fearlessness,” Ciminello said. 

4. If the book were an Italian recipe, it would be Belladonna Marie Donato’s Secret Magic Meatball Recipe (“Good for any miracle you may need”).

It’s not just the meatballs themselves that are magical, Ciminello said. It’s also the process of making them. If he’s having an off day, or he’s troubled or anxious or sad, he finds that it helps to start cooking.

“I get in that kitchen and I start smashing that garlic, and I start grating that cheese, and I start chopping those ingredients, and I put them all together and I mix them, and it’s somewhere in that process I find the entire bad day will just lift away,” he said.

Cooking for and eating with others, as Bella does throughout the book, is healing, Ciminello said. “It’s satisfying, it’s communal, it’s celebratory.”

5. The book’s primary message is about family, in all the shapes it can take.

After leaving the chaos of her birth family, Bella finds one new family after another: with the love of her life, Francis Anthony Mozzarelli; with the Irish cook in the rectory where she takes refuge during her pregnancy; with the Coney Island performers who welcome her into their home when she has nowhere else to go.

“Armistead Maupin, in his Tales of the City books, called it the logical family,” Ciminello said. “The logical family, the family that you find and create for yourself.”

He hopes his readers find families as well.

“Everyone deserves one,” he said. “Of whatever stripe, whatever kind. Absolutely. That’s my one desire, deepest desire.”