If You Eat, You Never Die: Chicago Tales - Softcover

Romano, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060857943 ISBN 13: 9780060857943

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2008

Synopsis

In a neighborhood on Chicago's outskirts, Fabio and Lucia Comingo have built a new American life—and struggle to comprehend the influences that distract and change their restless young sons. Through this masterful evocation of a time and place, Tony Romano, the acclaimed author of When the World Was Young, brings a first-generation Italian American family vividly and poignantly alive in closely related tales at once joyous, heartbreaking, and honest. Weaving two dozen stories into a stunning, cohesive family history, Romano gives readers hope for togetherness amid the painful generational cycle of loss and redemption—as children grow and learn, and decide which treasures of cultural inheritance they will cherish.

About this title

About the Author:

Tony Romano is the author of When the World Was Young and a two-time winner of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. His work has been produced on National Public Radio's Sound of Writing series and syndicated to newspapers nationwide.

From Booklist:

Italian-born Lucia struggles with English, her husband Fabio’s lack of ambition, and the willfulness of her American sons, Giacomo (Jimmy) and Michelino (Michael), and channels all her love and fury into cooking. In masterfully distilled stories of the Comingos turned Cummings, Romano illuminates a Chicago neighborhood and an entire universe of dreams and disappointments. All the psychological luster of his debut novel, When the World Was Young (2007), is found here curiously amplified by the restraint of the shorter form. Romano narrates fluently from different points of view, juxtaposing Italy-set stories of Lucia’s and Fabio’s youths with dramatic coming-of-age episodes in the Chicago lives of their sons, spiraling back and forward in time to reveal secrets, shame, regret, and relief. In bruising encounters, husbands and wives struggle over money and responsibility, and children reject smothering parental love, while everyone pays the price of outsiderness, assimilation, and thwarted love. Romano has a penetrating eye, respect for life, poise, and deep understanding of how helpless we are when emotions and actions betray reason. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0060857943
• ISBN 13: 9780060857943
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 257