I’m giving you a lot of book reviews recently only because I’ve been a little distracted. I had a tooth out last week, I have this feeling there’s a little fallout from that but I won’t find out until my appointment this afternoon. I also have various other medical appointments over the next few days which all lead me to not really being able to concentrate to actually write about the topics I have in mind. The good news is my GP tells me I’m alive, or at least I was last week.
Onto the book.
Looking for Alibrandi has been out for a while and I’m going to assume that most people have read it and not really going to tell you much about the plot. All I’ll say is that it’s about a young Italian girl who doesn’t fit the norms, she’s going through year 12 and just as the exams hit a very good friend commits suicide.
I always thought this book was about love and so I’d never read it, I did have a copy to sell at one stage so I had the chance but romance bores me so I made that assumption and didn’t. Bad. Move. This copy was one of the swag I picked up at the National Book Bloggers Forum in Sydney in May and I thank Random House for giving it to me. It’s also the third book in my Women Writers Challenge. I still have three more books to write about, one is not being published until next month so you’ll get that in a week or two, I’m still in the middle of John Safran’s book and the last book I may not read as I suspect it’s romance.
Anyway, I loved this book. I cried lots and am very annoyed for not reading it earlier. Marchetta tells the story from the point of view of a 17 year-old Italian girl also giving the story of her Italian grandmother when she was new to the country. This story is not a new one but it’s an important one to know as it’s happened in so many cultures and is probably still happening now. It’s the story of a new immigrant who doesn’t know the language and is isolated from society around her. It’s the story of a new immigrant who is ‘abandoned’ by her new husband in their house while he goes to work, sometimes for days and weeks at a time as he works away from home.
By chance, I happen to have spoken to Italian immigrants to this country and they’ve spoken about the isolation and the names people have called them. How hard it’s been setting up in a new country and how the population uses derogatory words about them. When I read the book all of these conversations came back to me and I found that what I was reading mirrored what I’d been told. It was very interesting. The stories I’d been told probably predated Alibrandi’s grandmother’s by a few years and happened in an inner suburb of Melbourne but the isolation and lack of integration into the pre-existing society was the same.
If there is a moral here then it should be that if you’re a current resident in the area and new immigrants move in you should make them welcome, talk to them and not use derogatory words about them. They are, after all, just people like you.
