ORANI: My Father's Village

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Aug 5, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Claire A. Nivola
Frances Foster/Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374356576
NA pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Kristi Jemtegaard

For many children, history is what happened last week, and ancient history consists of that murky, almost unfathomable period just before they were born. It's hard to envision their own parents as kids running down the dusty road to adulthood, much less imagine a place where "the cheese came from someone's cow, the honey from someone's bees." This shimmering memoir opens a window on the past and invites young readers to climb through it, into just such a world. Beginning with a map that locates the town of Orani "in the very heart of the island" of Sardinia in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, the author recounts her summer visits to her extended family. It was a very different world from her home in New York City. "Old women everywhere offered us holiday biscuits and chocolates," she writes. "The roadside trees bent low to hand us their fruit. All the village, it seemed, was ours." As families head off this summer to visit relatives or explore other parts of the world, the lyrical text and sun-drenched illustrations of this lovely book make a perfect bon voyage, a graceful reminder to a new generation to remember this time and cherish this place.

-- Kristi Jemtegaard

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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