Appealing details and a sense of delight distinguish author/illustrator Claire Nivola’s childhood memories of visiting Orani—the Mediterranean village on the island of Sardinia where her father grew up. “We ran to see a baby newly born to a neighbor, to eat ice cream at a café owned by an uncle, to ask the miller to grind a bag of wheat into flour, to watch the tailor stitch jackets for the shepherds, out of thick velvet ...” A festival, a wedding, and the rituals of mourning are woven into an account that also includes the everyday adventure of roaming the village streets, or watching the women bake in the middle of the night to avoid the day’s heat. While Nivola’s memories seem gathered from a collection of years, her inviting illustrations set them over the course of a single trip. Her younger self is shown among the people and the places of Orani in images awash in deep blues, sun-drenched whites, and sun-baked reds. Nivola’s author’s note discusses her family connection to a place that has, she notes, undergone inevitable change since her childhood. (Ages 5–9)

One of School Library Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of 2011

One of Horn Book's Best Nonfiction Books of 2011

As a child, Claire Nivola loved summers in Orani, the village where her father grew up and where her many aunts, uncles, and 50 cousins still lived. She ran freely through the town's cobbled streets with packs of cousins, who quizzed her about America while she took in all teh simple joys and pleasures of daily life in a village where surprises met them at every turn.

In this sensuous homage of prose and pictures, Nivola invites readers to share in her experience of Orani, a village where surprises met them at every turn and luxuries were unheard of, but life was rich, lived close to the earth.