One of School Library Journal 's Best Nonfiction Books of 2011
One of Horn Book 's Best Nonfiction Books of 2011
As a child, Claire Nivola loved summers in Orani, the village where her father grew up and where her many aunts, uncles, and 50 cousins still lived. She ran freely through the town's cobbled streets with packs of cousins, who quizzed her about America while she took in all teh simple joys and pleasures of daily life in a village where surprises met them at every turn.
In this sensuous homage of prose and pictures, Nivola invites readers to share in her experience of Orani, a village where surprises met them at every turn and luxuries were unheard of, but life was rich, lived close to the earth.
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Summary
Add a SummaryWhen Claire was a kid she and her family would travel back to Sardinia, her father’s birthplace, and visit with friends and relatives in the village of Orani. There, a small girl could see a whole host of wonders. From tiny lizards sunning themselves in the sun to tethered goats and donkeys. There were funerals and weddings, babies and corpses, figs and flies, new bread and dances. Eventually the family would have to return home to New York City and the child would look around and wonder. Does every immigrant have an Orani of their own somewhere?
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Add a CommentVery child-centric and appealing, the illustrations and the words of this charming book describe a child's view of life in an Italian village. Birth and death, parties and daily work, are all portrayed equitably.
Generally speaking, the American picture book memoir tends to focus on families that have immigrated to the States. The nice thing about Claire A. Nivola’s Orani: My Father’s Village is that it goes the other way. The American immigrant and his family return to the old country on a regular basis and his daughter, now grown, recounts what it was like to have a place like Sardinia visit. The result is a strangely haunting, heady look at a microcosm of birth, death, marriage, and strife shrunk down to a size just perfect for a child.