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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThreads and Flames
Esther M. Friesner
After recovering from typhus, thirteen-year-old Raisa leaves her Polish shtetl for America to join her older sister, and goes to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.
Ashes of Roses
Mary Jane Auch · 250 pages
in 1914, Rose Nolan and her family come to America from Ireland. After some of the family has to be sent back, the rest of her family moves in with her uncle and live there. The book is focused through her point of view. It centers her life as a worker at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.
The Museum of Extraordinary Things
Alice Hoffman · 384 pages
Coney Island, 1911: Coralie Sardie is the daughter of a self-proclaimed scientist and professor who acts as the impresario of The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a boardwalk freak show offering amazement and entertainment to the masses. An extraordinary swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid alongside performers like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl, and a 100 year old turtle, in her father's "mus
You Bring the Distant Near
Mitali Perkins · 303 pages
From 1965 through the present, an Indian American family adjusts to life in New York City, alternately fending off and welcoming challenges to their own traditions.
The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel
Susan Jane Gilman · 528 pages
Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans seventy years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. An
The Fortunate Pilgrim
Mario Puzo · 301 pages
Lucia Santa has traveled three thousand miles of dark ocean, from the mountain farms of Italy to the streets of New York, hoping for a better life. Instead, she finds herself in Hell's Kitchen, in a bad marriage, raising six children on her own. As Lucia struggles to hold her family together, her daughter confronts the adult world of work and romance while her eldest son is drawn into the mafia. M
The Friends
Rosa Guy · 196 pages
Phyllisia eventually recognizes that her own selfish pride rather than her mother's death and her father's tyrannical behavior created the gulf between her and her best friend.
In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson
Bette Bao Lord · 169 pages
In 1947, a Chinese child comes to Brooklyn where she becomes Americanized at school, in her apartment building, and by her love for baseball.
Brooklyn
Colm Toibin · 262 pages
In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t
Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903
Kathryn Lasky · 190 pages
New dreams and old traditions flourish and clash when a Jewish girl and her family emigrate from Russia to America.
The Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker · 512 pages
In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life to by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.
The American Lady
Petra Durst-Benning · 455 pages
A Fall of Marigolds
Susan Meissner
September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries... and finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the trut
Vita
Melania G. Mazzucco · 433 pages
Arriving at Ellis Island, two poor children from Southern Italy, Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, age nine, struggle to surive in New York City amid the poverty, opportunity, and crime of Italy.
Bread Givers: A Novel
Anzia Yezierska · 297 pages
A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.
The King of Mulberry Street
Donna Jo Napoli · 245 pages
In 1892, Dom, a nine-year old stowaway from Naples, Italy, arrives in New York and must learn to survive the perils of street life in the big city.
Lucky Broken Girl
Ruth Behar · 243 pages
In 1960s New York, fifth-grader Ruthie, a Cuban-Jewish immigrant, must rely on books, art, her family, and friends in her multicultural neighborhood when an accident puts her in a body cast.
Ellis Island
Kate Kerrigan · 368 pages
"In 1920s New York, a young Irish woman must choose between her new life and her husband back home in Ireland"--
The Walking People
Mary Beth Keane · 404 pages
Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in the west of Ireland until she found herself on a ship bound for New York. Labeled a "softheaded goose" by her family, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, raise her own family, and earn a living. Though she longs to return and show her family what she has made of herself, her decision to spare her children knowledge of a s
Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City 1909 (Dear America Series)
Deborah Hopkinson · 188 pages
ngela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory. Against the backdrop of the birth of the labor union movement in the early 1900s, Angela plays a part in the drama and turmoil that erupt
Elizabeth Street
Laurie Fabiano · 410 pages
"In Elizabeth Street, Laurie Fabiano tells a remarkable, and previously unheard, story of the Italian immigrant experience at the start of the twentieth century. Culled from her own family history, Fabiano paints an entrancing portrait of Giovanna Costa, who, reeling from personal tragedies, tries to make a new life in a new world. Shot through with the smells and sights of Scilla, Italy, and New
Brooklyn Bridge
Karen Hesse · 229 pages
In 1903 Brooklyn, fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom's life changes for the worse when his parents, Russian immigrants, invent the teddy bear and turn their apartment into a factory, while nearby the glitter of Coney Island contrasts with the dismal lives of children dwelling under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Leaving Ireland
Ann Moore · 515 pages
"Hoping for a better future, Gracelin O'Malley sets sail from her beloved Ireland, a journey that takes her to a world far different from anything she's ever known. After surviving the difficult voyage, she joins her brother Sean, already much changed by his exciting life in Manhattan. She takes a job in a saloon, learning firsthand the harsh reality of immigrant life and the horrors of the Irish
The Fire Horse Girl
Kay Honeyman
When Jade Moon, born in the unlucky year of the Fire Horse, and her father immigrate to America in 1923 and are detained at Angel Island Immigration Station, Jade Moon is determined to find a way through and prove that she is not cursed.