Glad Farm: OUR GOOD NAME
Our Good Name is the story of Italian immigrants who leave behind their beloved Apennine village in the 1890s to find their place in a strange new country. From the squalid transatlantic voyage to the shock of Ellis Island to the gritty factory town of Milford, Massachusetts, it is a tale of hardship and heart-wrenching losses at a time of tectonic social upheaval, including deadly labor union strikes, intense anti-immigrant sentiment, and the trial of their neighbor Nicola Sacco. This engaging historical novel reveals a rarely told side of the Italian-American experience, and the courage required to make a home in the New World.
“Catherine Marenghi has listened with a finely tuned ear to voices long past, to striving women and men, immigrants and seekers, and she has breathed a richly imagined life into forgotten souls. Speaking with many voices, Catherine has crafted a brilliant coloratura.”
—Jennifer Clement, author of Prayers for the Stolen, Gun Love, and Widow Basquiat
“As a child from an immigrant family, I felt a visceral connection with the vivid characters and experiences in Our Good Name is an evocative and fresh take on the timeless immigration story rendered with broad strokes of grief and joy, and occasional flecks of humor.”
—Richard Blanco, President Obama’s Inaugural Poet; author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos:
A Miami Childhood
“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.”
—Tom Burke, author of Evil Must Not Have the Last Word: The Life of Mary Wygodski
“These richly imaginative stories capture the poignant, heart-wrenching, flinty, brave, and heroic lives of Italian people who found a new home in Massachusetts. Catherine Marenghi has turned a little-known corner of New England into an emblem of the American immigrant experience.”
—Philip Gambone, author of As Far as I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II
