Sometimes I Dream in Italian

Rating:
Summary: Depressing
Review: I was very disappointed - there was no humor in any of these stories. There was not one character that was balanced or that I could even like. Italians are affectionate and they laugh at family gatherings - there was no warmth or laughter in this book.

Rating:
Summary: An honest, beautiful, compelling collection
Review: Rita Ciresi's talent as a writer of short stories is no more evident than in this collection, where her stories sing with language and emotion and details so realistic that you'll believe every sentence.

SOMETIMES I DREAM IN ITALIAN is divided into two sections: Ragazza-Girl and Donna-Woman. Within each section, we are treated to the awkward life of Angel, who struggles to reconcile her origins with her present self - and her imagined future self. Her Italian immigrant parents embarrass her and her sister Lina with their Old World ways and names. The girls just want to become glamorous, with underwear they'll throw out after one wearing and diamonds dripping from their necks. But their mother refuses to let them forget where they came from. As the two girls grow into disappointed women, with dreams they've had to adjust, Angel says (of German grammar, but it applies to her life), "I could not tell the who from the how and the where from the why." While I was reading this collection, I often laughed out loud, but, just as often, I felt the sorrow between the words.

Although this book portrays an Italian-American family, you don't need to have interest in this American subculture to enjoy it. Ciresi's detailed description of these lives is so beautifully rendered that the humanity shows through the smallest gesture. This book is ultimately about family and its bonds, both liberating and restrictive. And about the dreams we have for ourselves.

Rating:
Summary: Had it's bad points, but over all, great.
Review: Sometimes I dream in Italian was a mixed feelings book. The first half of the book was very good, but the second half was a little dissapointing. The mother seemed rather unrealistic. Lina and Angel had NO feeling for her, and in general, her character was underdeveloped.

I still reccomen this book, because it was a fun read, and the bad parts are tolerable. most of it is funny, and truthful.

Rating:
Summary: The poor mother!
Review: The beginning of this book was well written and made me think I was going to follow two young girls through their experience growing up in an Italian family. Pretty soon, I realized I was wrong. The girls are highly disrespectful of their mother, who seems to have no redeeming qualities. They have nothing good to say about their father and although they take care of both later in their lives (well, they put them in nursing homes), there is no love, tenderness, conflicts about their anger with their parents (and why are they SO mad?!) versus their loyalty to them! The sister is a basket case whom the younger sister can never get past admiring. And one of the most irritating parts of this book is the time factor. While the girls seem to be growing up, the sister has 2 kids, has an affair, and ultimately both parents die, but the sister's kids NEVER GET OLDER! They are always little so it makes you wonder how insightful the author really is if she can't even keep up with the time. In the end, I felt sorry for the parents for having two children who were so self-absorbed and selfish that, even as youngsters, they never even tried to relate to their elders-- also something that seemed unrealistic.

Rating:
Summary: About a girl..
Review: This book isn't really about an Italian-American girl rejecting her ethnic family for a more standard, Anglo-Saxon life. This book could have been about a girl of any ethnicity. It's about a girl rejecting family in her passage to womanhood.
Ask any girl, Italian-American or not, if they were ever embarrassed by her mother in the grocery store. As I was reading the first chapter, I never imagined that the girl's mother was really as embarrassing or odd as she portrayed her to be. We are seeing the mother through her daughter's eyes. The craziness, the quaintness, the ethnicity is magnified by the eyes of an awkward adolescent.
Ignore the reviewers who want this book to be the definitive picture of the life of an Italian American family. That's not what this is about. To expect that is unfair to this book.
If the author lived this life, then this is her honest expression about it. We don't have to know the history of the parents or their Italian heritage to understand this book. We have to know how it feels to move from being a member of a family to being an individual adult person.

Rating:
Summary: Not What I Expected
Review: This book was beautifully written, although sometimes a bit confusing. You really felt for the characters. My biggest problem with the book was that I read the back cover and expected something light-hearted and happy to read when I was sad. After reading the book I felt even worse. It was really depressing and made me feel somewhat hopeless. The book definately made you understand how the character felt. Now I'm going to have to read two fluffy books to feel better! Maybe I'll reread the Shopaholic series!

Rating:
Summary: A failure to locate the context of the events
Review: This book, written by someone who claims an Italian-American background, follows a model that often is used by other Italian-Americans who wish to recount their personal stories as persons who grew up in a household that one might regard as alien to the standard "middle class, white, non-ethnic" family.
The other reviews of this book, as entered on this site, nicely capture the kinds of things that are said about such books.
As one can see, the reviews are quite varied....
Why? Why do the reviewers on the one hand regard the writing in this book as revealing, "accurate," perceptive, insightful, but on the other hand as demeaning of the parents in the family, and one sided.
My analysis of this kind of writing leads me to a conclusion that I reached long ago as I reviewed one after another book that attempts to discuss growing up in an Italian-American family.
If I were a publisher, I would not publish a book of this type unless the writer first gave a thorough account of the history of his/her parents.
Italian-Americans need, before they write memoirs, to develop a context in which they can interpret their family.
It is a simple fact, is it not, that not every family is a middle class, white, well-educated family.
So, to take off after one's parents as if they somehow were ignorant, intolerant baboons because they did not espouse the values of middle class, white, well-educated parents does something of an injustice to those well-intentioned, hard working, committed people.
There is an old saying -- "You can't know your future if you don't know your past."
No Italian-American should try to write about his/her family without exploring the history of the family in the pre emigration Italy... without knowing the ways in which Italians were treated when the major waves of immigrants came to the USA .. and to the ways in which the descendants of the immigrants were subjected to the "Americanization" process.

And the most negative feature of books such as this is to be seen in the reviews in which the reviewers say that the writer "accurately" portrays his/her family. How would a reviewer know whether or not the portrayal is accurate? Does or does not not this kind of statement, especially when made by a non-Italian-American, indicate that the reviewer is assessing accuracy in terms of his/her stereotype? And from where did the reviewer get the stereotype?

As I say, we should call a moratorium on publication of books such as this.

There are very fine books about growing up in Italian-American families. In my estimation, those fine books first make an effort to set a context for the discussion of experiences in an Italian-American family.

Rating:
Summary: Depressing
Review: This is a conglomerate of short stories depicting the life of Angel (short for Angelina) and her sister Lina (short for Pasqualina) as they live in Long Island, NY with their Old World parents. The stories, told by Angel, take them from childhood through high school (in the section titles "Ragazzo", or "Girl") to adulthood and marriage (titled "Donna" or "Woman".)

It's touching and sweet, depicting every girls' frustration with her mother, particularly when she is trying to embrace all that is American while her mother insists on holding on to tradition, serving to create an even larger rift than what would have naturally occurred. There are also incidences with their father as well, a man who sells soda in a truck. There is illness, both mental and physical, death, problems with extended family, and growing up to a disappointing adulthood. But through it all, at least the girls have each other. Even if they don't always like each other, they do love and understand each other.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Written Look At Family Life
Review: This is my second Rita Ciresi book (I also read, and enjoyed, "Pink Slip") and I'm continually impressed with this writer's grasp of language. Her gently-paced, east-to-read stories, are laced with her own past (she's a third generation Italian-American) and make any reader understand what it means to possess (or be stuck with, depending on how you look at) a specific ethnic identity.

"Sometimes I Dream in Italian" is a sometimes funny, always poignant look at the Lupo family, whose daughters wish their father, whom they call Babbo, would change his name from Carlucci to the preferably American "Charles Wolf." The book, told from the perspective of younger daughter Angelina, known a Angel, bounces back and fourth between the Lupo girls less-than-perfect childhood and their equally unsettled present.

Ciresi doesn't rely on tired plot devices to entice readers to delve into the lives of the Lupo clan--there are no melodramatic events (planes crashes, kidnappings, child abuse, etc) to push the plot along--it's just the simple story of one family; a story very much like the stories all families have. Still, you're drawn to this obviously dysfunctional, but no more so that most, clan's tale--sucked in by the very ordinariness of their story. Ciresi is to be commended for making the every day seem extraordinary in her prose.