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.” (Age 12 and older)

“A wonderful book about figuring out who we are and who we want to be when we grow up. It’s also about being an American—especially a first-generation American.” —Roz Chast

This graphic-novel debut from an acclaimed picture book creator is a powerfully moving memoir of the author's experiences with family, religion, and coming of age in the aftermath of World War II, and the childhood struggles and family secrets that shaped her.

It’s 1950s New York, and Marisabina Russo is being raised Catholic and attending a Catholic school that she loves—but when she finds out that she’s Jewish by blood, and that her family members are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, her childhood is thrown into turmoil. To make matters more complicated, her father is out of the picture, her mother is ambitious and demanding, and her older half-brothers have troubles, too. Following the author’s young life into the tumultuous, liberating 1960s, this heartfelt, unexpectedly humorous, and meticulously illustrated graphic-novel memoir explores the childhood burdens of memory and guilt, and Marisabina’s struggle and success in forming an identity entirely her own.