Ruby Sisson Library

As she turns twelve during the summer of 1953, Penny gains new insights into herself and her family while also learning a secret about her father's death. It's1953 and 11-year-old Penny dreams of a summer of butter pecan ice cream, swimming, and baseball. But nothing's that easy in Penny's family. For starters, she can't go swimming because her mother's afraid she'll catch polio at the pool. To make matters worse, her favorite uncle is living in a...

Fourteen-year-old Calogero Scalise and his Sicilian uncles and cousin live in small-town Louisiana in 1898, when Jim Crow laws rule and anti-immigration sentiment is strong, so despite his attempts to be polite and to follow American customs, disaster dogs his family at every turn.

During a school trip to Ellis Island, Dominick Avaro, a ten-year-old foster child, travels back in time to 1908 Italy and accompanies two young emigrants to America.

Pretending to have a much more glamorous family life, eleven-year-old Isabella worries that her new friends at a prestigious private school will discover that she is a "big fibbing, faking phony."

When she drops out of school and struggles to start a career on Broadway in the fall of 1950, seventeen-year-old Kit Corrigan accepts help from an old family friend, a lawyer said to have ties with the mob, who then asks her to do some favors for him.

After two years in New York, Tony Petrosino speaks English and wants to stay in school, but his father insists he work full-time as a newsboy, where he battles an anti-Italian gang, sees even worse poverty than what his family experiences, and meets investigative reporter Jacob Riis.

Between 1933 and 1935, a young Italian American girl living in North Adams, Massachusetts, corresponds with President Franklin Roosevelt about the conditions in her town, Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, and her own family's activities.

An Italian immigrant boy joins the large Aldrich family as they stage a women's suffrage play and receive messages on the wireless radio about the ocean voyage of the Titanic.