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Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family
CCBC Review:
A graphic memoir relates a heartbreaking tale of intergenerational trauma as told by Cookie, a devout Catholic child growing up in the 1950s. Surrounded by white, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking family members, Cookie understands that her immigrant mother converted to Catholicism after World War II. Forced into hiding in Italy during the war, Mamma and her husband, Jacob, joined a group of resistance fighters before being discovered. Mamma survived a gunshot wound; Jacob was murdered by Nazis. Witnessing these horrors were her two young sons, Cookie’s much older half-brothers. While Cookie’s mother loves Cookie deeply, she is also critical, controlling, and anxious; Cookie’s brother Piero struggles greatly with mental illness and spends time in a psychiatric hospital. Cookie, frustrated that her aunts will not explain the series of numbers tattooed on their arms, learns her family history in bits and pieces over time. Born in the United States, she learns to make her own way even as she resents the fact that her own struggles—especially the pain of her absent father, who lives abroad—will always pale in comparison to those of her family members, who consider her to be “the lucky one.” ©2022 Cooperative Children’s Book Center
Illustrated by Marisabina Russo
CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 12 and older
Age Range:
Grades 6-8 (Ages 11-13)
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Formats:
Biography, Autobiography and Memoir
Graphic Novel
Substantial Narrative Non-Fiction
Subjects:
20th Century
Autobiography/Memoir
Christian People
Families
Holocaust
Immigration and Immigrants
Jewish People
Mental Health and Illness
Trauma
Diversity subjects:
Christian
Jewish
Psychiatric Disability/Condition
Publisher:
Farrar Straus Giroux
Publish Year: 2021
Pages: 225
ISBN: 9780374303839
CCBC Location: Non-Fiction, 741.5 Russo