Entre Nous: The Goosefoot Chronicles

Entre Nous: The Goosefoot Chronicles, Lydia Riantee Rand's fictionalized memoir, weaves a magic spell that shimmers between fact and fiction, past and present, the living and the dead. Told with amazing clarity and insight through the perceptions and voices of six family members, the tale unfolds to reveal the rich tapestry of a family rooted firmly in the ancient past by myth and folklore and the concepts of honor and duty, good and evil, love and hate. Slowly we come to understand that it is important to pass these myths and stories along from generation to generation in order to preserve the family's identity and sense of place in the world. As the patriarch, Giovanni, puts it, "I need to tell [these stories] to you so our myths won't be lost." But there is another side to preserving family history; that family secrets must also be maintained to avoid shame and dishonor, and in that, we see how lives get twisted, relationships destroyed and suffering passed from one generation to the next. It is a spellbinding story that takes us into a time and place and way of life that may no longer exist and we emerge from it wiser, with more insight and appreciation not only for Rand's characters' lives, that is, her family's, but for our own lives as well. "Entre Nous reminds me of the work of the great John Berger, his visionary mission to record the stories and mores of fast-disappearing European peasant life. 'I just let the Spiazzi's voices come and speak through me.' The awesome, sometimes terrifying marvel of those ancestral voices as the roots of the present is what this fabulous book is about." --Sharon Doubiago, My Father's Love