All This Talk of Love: A Novel.
Christopher Castellani takes the immigrant saga well beyond timeworn plots, showing us all that becoming American effects, but doesn’t erase, our being Italian.
“We didn’t go to Italy to sight see. We went so that my mother could visit the family she’d given up to marry my father, who’d emigrated to America after World War II.
We went so that my parents could introduce me to the “real” world—vivid, honest, and unspoiled— and so they could escape the harsh and colorless “new” world.
We went because my mother missed her best friends, her six brothers and sisters, who were still relatively young and very much alive.”