An interesting memoir about family history, home and belonging, language, culture and identity. At the heart of it is the author's 95 year old grandmother Dirce who, like the author, lived between Italy and England. Woven into the stories of Dirce and her family is history from Garibaldi to a popular 1930s Italian romance author.

While well written and interesting, I found Dandelions somewhat meandering and difficult to relate to. It is a very personal work with Lenarduzzi and her family's migrant experiences quite different to my own experience of migration and 'home' in particular.

My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Dandelions.

A stunning family memoir about the author's, Thea Lenarduzzi's journey of exploring her family's history.
Spanning over 4 generations and two different cultures, Italy and England, this memoir explores familial relationships, cultural differences, political history, immigration and identity.
As an immigrant myself, I deeply related to her thoughts and her family story.
Calling two places your home, but not fully belonging to either of them, was something I deeply related to.
The writing was beautiful and I found her story very intriguing.

More than a mere memoir, this expansive exploration of the author's family serves as a contemplation on notions of home, identity, belonging, and migration. The themes of the book immediately attracted me to it and I knew I had to read it. I think in many ways it feels like a warm, cosy exploration of the idea of home. As someone who has been living abroad for many years, I was able to connect with so many moments of this book.

Anchored by the author's cherished grandmother and her captivating stories, the narrative meanders through various territories, occasionally veering too far into tangential anecdotes that may lose the interest of readers without personal connections to the individuals mentioned. Nonetheless, it remains a commendable piece of literature, characterised by its intelligence, perceptiveness, and deeply personal touch, all the while maintaining a universal appeal that resonates with readers across diverse backgrounds.

If you like Ginzburg or Polly Barton's memoir, this book is for you.

Wonderful from it's first page where the narrative of Nonna's recollections, glossed by her grand- daughter, the narrator and author seeking out and expanding on her memories. The narrative is kind of seamless, and won't let you go .. we want to know of her grandmother's life, but also we are intrigued by the motivations of a set of people intent on emigrating .. and why, and how, when are all explored. It may well be that my journalist husband's experience as an Italian who emigrated to the UK to engage with international English speaking World has contributed to engaging me (and the other Italian emigres I have met through him) .. but it seems to me this applies to an emigre from Kenya too whose superb long poem about her grandmother I will not forget, and which had many similar themes of displacement, and yet enthusiastic grasp of the new beginnings ... dandelions sweep easily through the world, where they are often thgt of as weeds, but which are equally renown, if you know of it, for their medicinal qualities, the author tells us.a superb book, deserving wide reading .. and notice.

It’s hard to properly explain my feeling towards this book. On the one hand, the topics explored in the book are right up my alley. On the other hand, I had a hard time connecting to the story the author wished to tell.

Thank you to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for sending me an advanced copy

Apologies to the publisher but I didn't have time to read this but it wasn't due to lack of interest - it was just removed from my library very quickly! I think it was too close to the pub date.

3,5 - This started out very well, but lost momentum towards the end.

Thea Lenarduzzi asked her Italian grandmother to tell her life story and then turned it into an essayistic family memoir. Nonna's life is not all that extraordinary, except that after the war she emigrated to England and spent 20 years working in Manchester, and this experience serves to explore themes of identity, home, nationality.

If you are interested in Italy, its language and history there are many interesting vignettes, anecdotes andmost on the theme of (Italian) identity - on Garibaldi, d'Annunzio, Pasolini, italianità, Cuore, fascism, the emigrant's experience, dialects, the miracolo economico, Brigate Rosse... But there were also sections where I found the link between the family history and whatever the author wanted to explore very far-fetched.

e-arc provided by netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

"non mi ricordo."

this is a book about a grandmother, about a family, about italy, about life.

there is nothing i can say about 'dandelions' without first establishing the sheer magnitude of love and reverence that runs through it. through minute details and a careful putting-to-paper of her family history, thea lenarduzzi has crafted a book that feels like sitting in on a private conversation and trying to hold on to every word spoken. i thought i was getting a biography, when instead, this was a book about everything. through the lens of dirce, lenarduzzi's nonna, we see how the twentieth century played out in italy and beyond, we see a life lived, tears shed and love felt.

frankly, it is difficult to put into words what this book did to me, just as it would be difficult to express the full meaning of a grandmother. she is grander than life, and yet so fragile. she has lived more than you think you ever will, and downplays everything to clear the path for you.

it is wondrous how many stories we carry.

I really wanted to love this - I tried, and gave a lot more leeway than I normally would to a book I don't click with but ultimately - I couldn't make it work. This was the first DNF for me in a very long time.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

The most beautifully written memoir of family, identity and place. The author and her family bounced off the page and I haven't stopped thinking about them since.

One of my first ebooks in a while but i actually really liked it for this one because it’s a great one to read in little pieces. Most of the time I read it on trains to and from work and the journeys went so fast because of it. The premise of dandelions is Lenarduzzi visiting and calling her grandmother to recount the history of their family entwined with some stories of Italy’s history itself. And it was absolutely stunning, it felt like listening to your own relative regale you with stories of their past. I don’t know how to explain it other than to say this was such a soft and gentle read, there were absolutely some upsetting and hard moments but I think because of the kind of figure ‘nonna’ is, they are met with this acceptance. It has also made me desperate to visit Italy, food descriptions always get me like that and there’s a nice scattering of them throughout this book. This is definitely my favourite memoir in a while and I’m so excited to read more of her work

A wonderful portrayal of Italian family life, ancestry and tradition. I loved the smattering of linguistic and historical facts peppered throughout and thoroughly enjoyed this book. Thanks NetGalley!

Thank you to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for this ARC.

A slow beautiful story, just like sitting down with nonna and asking her about her early life. Lots of food description and dandelion imagery.

Where, or what, is home? What has it meant, historically and personally, to be ‘Italian’ or ‘English’, or both in a culture that prefers us to choose? What does it mean to have roots? Or to have left a piece of oneself somewhere long since abandoned? At the heart of this book brimming with the lives of remarkable and apparently unremarkable people is Thea’s grandmother Dirce, a former seamstress, who, now approaching 100, is a repository of tales that are by turns unpredictable, unreliable, significant. And that lead us deeper. There’s the one about Mussolini’s modern Icarus who crashed into the murk of a lake; about the Manchester factory worker who wanted only to be seen; about the shadowy demon who visits in your sleep; and the monument to a murdered politician that, when it rains, runs the colour of blood.

Through the journeys of Dirce and her relatives, from the Friuli to Sheffield and Manchester and back again, a different kind of history emerges, in which self and place are warp and weft, tightly woven, with threads left hazardously trailing.
Riveting read ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

What mostly stands out of Lenarduzzi's "Dandelions" is the prose, which is elegand and poignant, and the imagery that is haunting and absolutely moving.

Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions is a beautifully written history of her Italian family, but it is also an examination of the migrant experience, and family narratives, each one unique, some stories true, some stories embellished. She says “It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times... If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.” This is a beautiful poetic account, that like the tales of Thea’s Nonna will “not be tamed by anything like conventional narrative structures” Loose threads brought together by poetry. I loved this book, I loved the ideas, the descriptions and the diversions. This is a book to sit somewhere quiet with, when you have time to give to the words.

Dandelions is a family memoir stretching over four generations who move back and forth between England (Sheffield and Manchester) and Italy (Maniago, Friuli- Venezia Giulia region), weaving a tapestry of stories of love and loss and family myths and legends interstitched with essayistic ruminations on topics that seem to come to Lenarduzzi in a process of free association when reflecting on bicultural identity and exploring what it means to live in between two different cultures: food, vegetation, the sense of (not)belonging, linguistic observations, piecing together fragments and anecdotes drawn from social and political history of England and Italy.

Central in the memoir are Thea Lenarduzzi’s (mostly telephone) conversations with her nonagenarian grandmother Dirce. Lenarduzzi interviews her (sometimes reluctant and taciturn) nonna on her memories and the family’s past, in which she almost seems to approach Dirce as a potentially inexhaustible receptacle of tales and anecdotes, ever hoping to find more beneath the shrugs of her nonna, eager to find stories - where there maybe are none. Touching on events and significant figures in Italian History (from Garibaldi over Mussolini, the assault in Bologna, the assassination of Aldo Moro), if this memoir makes anything clear it is that much of History passes by people unnoticed and that is very hard to access it again, the past being a foreign country, even for the contemporaries who lived it.

Despite Thea Lenarduzzi’s beautiful, elegant and eloquent writing, quite early on I realised Dandelions wasn’t a book for me. It is hard to read a family memoir making abstraction from one’s own family history and memories. I acknowledge I don’t like to be reminded of that when I am reading – reading has always been my main refuge from what I experienced as stifling. Readers who are more comfortable with their own family relationships might enjoy this a lot more. The book left me mostly cold and even slightly rubbed me in the wrong way. Reading along until the end, I also felt trapped as when meeting with a friend who is eager to show thousands of holiday pictures or who cannot stop spinning endless stories on their incredible wide network of relatives and acquaintances, basking in every detail in these lives full of interest and meaning to that friend, but insignificant and colourless to an outsider who has no connection to them. With this memoir Lenarduzzi seems have Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon in mind as a model– a book she also explicitly mentions – and though I admire Ginzburg’s fiction and essays, I recall struggling with that book as well.

Gradually I felt myself turning overly critical and ungenerous towards Lenarduzzi’s reflections. As much as the metaphors on the dandelions are a fascinating angle to capture both immigration (the spreading of the fluffy seeds), strangeness and xenophobia (dandelions as food; dandelions that are considered weeds in a lawn and so to eradicate) in one strong, multifaceted image, I was put off by the underlying tone of exceptionality of her family’s story and their position in a foreign country. Neither was I able to believe that eating dandelions – gathered and served up by her grandmother - is so uniquely Italian (it used to be common in the low countries before the second world war too). But maybe that is the whole point of the book, highlighting the exceptionality of experiences for the individual, in which it is actually unimportant if these experiences really are exceptional or not, the only thing mattering being how they are individually experienced? Lenarduzzi’s book reminded me of Bertolt Brecht’s song The Ballad of Mack the Knife And some are in the dark, and others are in the light. But one only sees those in the light; those in the dark, one doesn't see. However laudable Lenarduzzi’s venture to shed a light on people who would likely have remained in the dark, for me it missed the compaction in storytelling I enjoy in fiction.

‘There is a divide here between two different forms of knowledge, two different ways of recording events and experiences, and the one is almost incomprehensible to the other. Their values are incomparable. One exists inside a person, like the knots and rings of a tree; the other is made of words, placed outside for others to see.’

‘Dandelions’ is a beautiful patchwork history that spans both the public and private spheres of Lenarduzzi’s family. Her grandmother’s life spent between Italy and England is central to the book, with meandering explorations of wider family dynamics and Italian identity as a whole laced throughout. Lenarduzzi’s generation-spanning record of her family and the sociocultural history that surrounds them examines the nature of memory itself, and how we construct the stories of our lives for not only others but ourselves.

Thank you to NetGalley for early access in exchange for an honest review! I’m looking forward to reading more from Thea in the future!

Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi explores family history, the immigrant experience and being between two cultures.

Mini review - Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi

This book appealed to me because my husband’s grandmother is Italian. She moved to the UK after the war to marry a man from Ukraine (then Poland) who had escaped the Nazis. Those stories could have been a memoir, I’m sure!

Dandelions pieces together a family history, rich with food, politics and the legends that families share. I enjoyed some of the tangents it took for example to explain the significance of dandelions to Italians.

It’s a good reminder to take interest in your family past, listen to your elder’s stories, even if you’ve heard them many times before because you’ll probably learn something new about yourself.