“We are a nation of immigrants.” Now that I have read Catherine Marenghi, I finally know what that means.
Our Good Name is a meticulously researched and sensitively told story of an Italian family who built one little corner of America. We’re with them. We hear their conversations and feel their joy and pain. With a journalist’s ear for dialogue, a poet’s gift for description, and a historian’s perspective for what matters to community and country, the author guides us through the gardens and kitchens and rice fields of their old world; into steerage on the way to their new world; and among the fields and schools and factories and often-unwelcoming towns and courts of law of their adopted land.
But this is not merely the kind of historical fiction that everyone who wishes to understand America should read. In telling their own stories in their own unique voices, seven of Ms Marenghi’s forebears fashion for us an eloquent prequel to her enthralling personal memoir, Glad Farm.
Our Good Name will touch your heart just as Glad Farm did. It is a fitting and welcome addition to the Marenghi canon.
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