Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron
Three years ago, I resigned from my lawyer job to write a novel. The seed had been planted two years prior, during our pandemic lockdown. In November 2020, my 4th and 6th graders and I embarked on a challenge: we enrolled in the now-defunct NaNoWriMo program and each spent thirty days drafting our first novel. My children’s stories were wild fantastical romps, fully-formed and primed for several sequels. Mine was an ode to my maternal line. Finishing it, I realized, was going to be a full-time job.
At press time, it’s 2025. And while I have written shorter pieces during my hiatus from the legal profession, my novel lies dormant. Evidently, writing a novel is very hard work, wide open spaces of time notwithstanding. Novels are long, and my subject matter fraught. As time passed, self-doubt claimed the narrative. A novel about my great-grandmother? What was I thinking?
I was thinking, it turns out, that to write about certain people is to love them. I was thinking, perhaps, what Catherine Gigante-Brown reveals in her own novels, inspired by her own family: that every person is a story worth telling, every family a world worth exploring.
Gigante-Brown has written eight novels, including The El Trilogy, inspired by her father’s side of the family. Her latest novel, Immigrant Hearts, imagines the love story between her Italian-born maternal grandparents, Luisa and Antonio. The story starts in 1919. Luisa Tozzi is ten, living in a Brooklyn tenement with her parents, with whom she emigrated as an infant from Longobucco, and an ever-growing number of younger siblings. She bears the brunt of her mother’s unmanaged rage and dreams of going to school. Across the pond, Antonio DeMarco is nearly twenty. He’s recently returned from war, floundering on the family farm and dreaming of America.
In the first part of the book, which spans thirteen years, we follow Luisa’s coming of age, Antonio’s move to Brooklyn, their respective careers in the garment district, and the ultimate intertwining of their lives. Each chapter offers one of four alternating perspectives: Antonio’s and Luisa’s, along with Henrietta’s (Antonio’s mother), and Assunta’s (Luisa’s mother). This narrative approach adds breadth and perspective, highlighting the stakes that face immigrants as well as those they leave behind, and factoring into the love story the layers of family dysfunction that we all inevitably inherit and pass on. Henrietta, who never leaves Italy, sleeps with her son’s letters under her pillow and adores from afar the daughter-in-law she will never know. Assunta’s entire existence as an American is blackened by guilt and grief: when the family immigrated, they left behind Luisa’s older sister, who died shortly thereafter of influenza. Immersed in the hopes and angsts, losses and opportunities of two generations – and seeing our protagonists through the penetrating gaze of their mothers – I could appreciate both the solace Luisa and Antonio find in one another, and the tension that defines their contrasting experiences of family life and being American.
The second part of the book is shorter, featuring a near-omniscient narrator who zeroes in on the lives of several characters over the course of one year. Each chapter recounts one month, and is prefaced with a list of three real-life events that occurred in that month. It’s 1940. Mussolini has joined forces with Hitler and the garment industry has not rebounded since the Depression. New York hosts the World Fair and FDR implements the first peacetime draft. The DeMarcos brave economic uncertainty, anti-Italian vitriol, and Mafia threats.
“I feel like everything is out of control.” …
“The truth is, we never have control over anything. Ever.”
“Then what do we have?” Luisa pressed.
“We have one another.” (217)
Immigrant Heart’s back cover aptly describes the novel as a “vintage love story.” The novel offers an old-fashioned ambience, with soft edges and enormous heart. Gigante-Brown avoids sensational twists. The plot is instead propelled by the ordinary ups and downs of being human: love, loss, and the perils of trying to do the right thing amidst adversity, all against the backdrop of World War I, the Great Depression, and the spread of fascism into Luisa and Antonio’s country of origin. The main action’s twenty-year span is vividly brought to life. And while some historical fiction offers escapism, Immigrant Hearts draws connections to the present. We never have control, but do have one another. If only we all could honor our ancestors with such specificity and love.
It almost makes me want to revisit my own novel.
Immigrant Hearts by Catherine Gigante-Brown
Volossal Publishing, 2025, 345 pages, $24.99 [paper]
ISBN 9781963359206
Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) reads, writes, and mothers in Minneapolis. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction appear in various journals, including Literary Mama and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and on her Substack: Writing it Out.