I requested this book because I am always intrigued by an immigrant story, unfortunately the description was better than the book. The dialogue was painful to get through, characters were uninspired and was there even a plot?

Oh boy, this is a serious TOME. While the authoress's writing skills are on a high level and she certainly is a loving, caring mother hen to her characters, I seriously believe that the novel should be shortened to almost to the half of its length. I think that the liking of this novel depends on your liking the characters and your interest in the time period (mostly told in connection to the Ford motor company and its influencxe on both the workers there and the U.S. politics). To me, its day-to-day descriptions are charming, but also so very often I felt as watching the paint dry. Also, the characters are "everyday people", which makes them relatable, but also not very interesting.

Fun fact - the authoress is daughter of famous actress Marlene Dietrich.

When I read the blurb for this book, it sounded just like my type of book. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations. The plot was very slow, and it was hard to connect with the characters. Other people may like it, but it wasn't for me. Thank you!

I really wanted to like this book. I liked the characters at the beginning, but it didn't seem to really have a clear focus. It got really slow, and I had to push through it.

Fascinating historical saga that will transport you back in time…
Maria Riva’s You Were There Before My Eyes shares the experiences, thoughts and feelings of American Immigrants through the life of Giovanna, “Jane”; a plain but thoughtful young Italian teen who jumps into a marriage of convenience to escape her small village life and loss of her mother. Beginning in the late 1800s, the story follows Jane’s trans-Atlantic journey to Henry Ford’s Michigan, where her husband is a prominent engineer. A diverse cast of rich and captivating characters fills out the story and provides additional perspectives. Jane’s unique experience is highlighted; from learning the language and customs, to settling in a new town with new friends, to discovering the woman she truly is.

Even non-history fans will appreciate You Were There Before My Eyes. The attention to detail and inclusion of the many of Jane’s experiences provides an authentic perspective on turn of the century life for resident aliens. I enjoyed Riva’s writing style and recreation of history so much that I really wasn’t bothered that it took well into the book to figure out the plot-line. Riva’s picturesque language overflows each page captivating the reader, providing rich and vivid details layered between the terrifying but awe-inspiring experience of moving to a new country that abounds in choices. But this is not just a history book. Jane’s personal development and how each secondary character’s story plays out were very intriguing. I found myself reflecting frequently on the time period and Jane’s thoughts and actions, contemplating how much life and attitudes have changed while in some ways following the same patterns generation after generation.

You Were There Before My Eyes by Maria Riva earned four stars from me. While not everyone will like the slow pace of the plot, which allows Riva to share and abundance of historical detail and experience, I did. The thoroughness of the storytelling truly felt like a window to the past. Most of the book felt like a leisurely walk through the woods, taking time to really see the the sights and smells and sounds. My biggest issue was when the events leading up to WWII spilled across the ocean and affected Jane, her family and friends. At this point it felt like the story went from nature walk to drag race and was done. I would have loved to see the same attention to detail concerning each character continued, which would have lengthened the book considerably.

You Were There Before My Eyes. It is a wonderful read for history buffs or anyone fascinated with turn of the century immigrants.

This novel had an odd tone that made it hard to connect with.

A young couple leave their native Italy at the beginning of the 20th century to start a new life in America. Giovanni and Giovanna change their names to John and Jane and set out on their quest to achieve the American Dream, with a bit of help from Henry Ford and his innovative industrial practices. I can’t pretend this is a great piece of literary fiction. It’s very dialogue heavy and many of the characters talk in speeches rather than conversations. There are many stereotypes and the German landlady, who is there throughout the novel, talks in a particularly irritating German accent – which is even more irritating as none of the other characters have an accent, whatever part of Europe they come from. However, as a compelling family historical saga the novel is compelling and brings to life the time and place in a particularly authentic and engaging way. The period detail is well-researched and interesting. The descriptions of Ford, his factory and his cars, and the later degradation of his earlier idealism, I found especially fascinating. I learnt a lot. We see John and Jane’s world disintegrate as war comes and life gets increasingly complex and difficult. As a social history of these early years of the 20th century the book has much to commend it and its literary failings, I feel, can be forgiven, and hopefully overlooked. There have been some bad reviews and I can’t in all honesty refute them – although I do feel they are perhaps unduly harsh. But then I’m a bit of a sucker for a good old family chronicle and this one kept me happily reading all the way through.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free digital ARC of this book. This book is true to its title description. The reader won't be disappointed when reading this book.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book. There wasn't an arching storyline to keep the reader engaged and entertained. It was just relaying the events of Jane's life after leaving Italy. The author wove in major historic events in her life and showed how it affected everyday life of average people, but it did not keep my attention. I finished the book but I would not recommend this to anyone.

I did not post my review anywhere else online.

I was not able to connect with Riva and the story just did not hold.my interest. . Since I did not finish this I will not post any review on Goodreads or Amazon.

I truly wanted to love this book. I loved the cover, the description, and I thought it would fit right in with my love of other historical fiction novels.

If someone loves in-depth descriptions and more overarching storylines, then they may enjoy this book. However, I could not enjoy the drawn-out story and it didn't ever really feel as though it picked up.

I did like some of the information that I learned about Henry Ford, though I knew some of it already. He is not the bright, shiny beacon of industry that so many history books paint him as.

However, I felt as though the plot and the dialogue could use a little more fire and passion. (Not like romantic novel passion, but more passion just in terms of joie de vivre).

While I am grateful for the ARC provided by NetGalley and the publisher, this book didn't live up to my hopes for it.

I am surprised at the reviews that say it was boring or slow. It was a book that spanned decades of a woman's life from immigrating from Italy to marriage to having a family and beyond.

The author even points out multiple times that the times were different. Men and women had very different roles.

This book did not wax poetic about Henry Ford. If anything, it lead me to research some of his less than stellar things. As characters, they had to see the change.

There were some slow parts yes but in order to cover the decades that it did some slow parts can be expected to help us understand the evolution of the characters and it does jump from character to character but that gave me more insight to what was going on.

You Were There Before My Eyes

A Novel
by Maria Riva

Open Road Integrated Media
General Fiction (Adult) , Historical Fiction

Pub Date 10 Oct 2017

I am reviewing a copy of You Were There Before My Eyes through Open Integrated Media and Netgalley:

At the age of eight Giovanna lost her Mother and gave up on God. As an only child she had a room of her own, but now the room seemed forlorn, lonely. By the age of seventeen she had a spinsters body, flat chested and angular, thin from to much work and lack of proper nutrition. When the opportunity for her to leave her small Italian turn of the century village Giovanna decides to take that opportunity. She moves to America to be with her young husband Giovanni in the ford factories.

Determined to survive and to thrive Jane finds herself navigating a new language. Jane seeks her innerfullfillment while she and John start to build a family. She learns too of the Different Holiday traditions in America.

You Were There For me takes us on a journey from Italy to America in the warly twentieth century, this is a story of the struggles and triumphs of one young immigrant family.

I give You Were There For Me five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Much as I dislike giving books a low star review, this one deserves it in my opinion. With dull, insipid characters and bland dialogue, it is difficult to find even 1 good thing about this. Descriptions of Italy were okay, and the research, especially about Henry Ford, was well done. Only my opinion.

3.5 Stars.... Being a historical fiction fan, there is a lot to really like about this book. As we move further and further from an event in history, more and more details are lost to us. Ms. Riva has done her homework and given us forgotten details about immigration, the beginnings of the industrial revolution and assembly automation, and last but not least, world politics and war.

Two immigrants Giovanni and Giovanna enter the USA and begin their lives as a married couple, they reside in a boarding house with many other Ford automobile immigrant workers. Most of the story revolves around the boarders in this boarding house run by Hannah (my favorite character) and Fritz her husband. This part of the book was heartfelt, as each person regardless of religion or country of origin, before prejudices ran rampant, would do anything to help another. Ms. Riva reminds us of the struggles of the immigrants of that time, coming through Ellis Island, being mentally and physically checked for ailments, scared to be denied entry, so appreciative and proud of the opportunity to be in America. Although today in the U.S. there are many immigration issues, it is good to be reminded of what our earliest immigrants were made to endure, making it easier for later generations to come.

There was a lot of detail in the book about Henry Ford and his automobile factory. This part of the book although I felt bogged it down, was also a critical element. The evening parlor discussions at the boarding house were mostly about work at the factory and what Henry Ford would do next. I enjoyed learning what a great employer Ford was. He was innovative with his offered wages, hired immigrants and was forward thinking. It was enlightening to me that Ford set up a Social Department to check on the home lives of his workers to assure they were living the lives he expected them to live. I would have never thought that an employer would or could go to an employee's home and check to see if they had any alcohol in the house, how they raised their children, if they were learning to speak English, etc.

The book was full of great detail and dialogue. I thought the author did a fantastic job of accenting Hannah's vocabulary so I could understand her with her German accent. I thought the book title was a perfect fit for the story.

My only critique and the reason I gave this book 3.5 rather than 4.5 stars is because it bogged down.. It was simply too long. As interested in the characters as I was, I still found myself anxious to just get the dang book over with by the end. Otherwise, great read and would recommend.

A beautiful story of life in a time when family was important and about the hardships of life that bring about change and hopes of love. This is a nicely written story that starts out sad and ends with a wonderful lesson on seeing things as they are, but hoping for them to get better. I would recommend it for lovers of history and drama.

Sit back, set aside several hours and enjoy this gem of a book. The author did a wonderful job of drawing you into the lives of John and Jane. Giovanni (Jane) originally from Italy wanted more from life than taking care of her father after her mother’s untimely death as a teenage girl. She achieved her wish.
This story follows John and Jane thru their lives of coming to America for the opportunities it provided to immigrants in 1917, thru WWI, and into the 30’s with the beginning of WWII. It also details the timeline of Henry Ford’s dynasty from starting with the Tin Lizzie’s, the Ford progress and his aspirations for international factories in the 1920’s and 30’s. Learning about some of Henry Ford’s requirements for his workers and the unheard of $5.00 a day was just an added bonus in following John and Jane’s life, marriage, children, challenges of the time for women and adventures traveling.
You feel as if you are sitting in the drawing room each evening when the “Ford” guys talk about work and politics, and you come to know every boarder at Hannah and Fritz’s. It has love, loss, heartbreak, courage, sadness, and the coming of age of a marriage. It covers politics of the times, the unrest in Europe, and how the average workers were affected by the downturn of the times and the depression. The author puts into perspective of how the automobile, the telephone, how immigrants were viewed by the American people, the pre WWII hatred of Jews and how Germans were criticized and treated during WWI.
I would highly recommend, I did feel that the last years of John and Jane’s life seemed to rush by and I did not see the ending coming. Took me by complete surprise. A gem of a book.

Imagine emigrating to a foreign country far across an ocean completely unprepared, without the modern safeguard of a telephone or low-budget airlines, not to mention internet access or skype calls, your journey being likely one without return. Imagine having to face the same problems as modern expats - racism, language barriers, isolation, sociopolitical landslides, the impossibility of regularly delivered mail - but to a much greater degree. Imagine going through two World Wars in addition to that. Imagine being an early 20th-century immigrant, in a time before the word "globalization" even existed.

You Were There Before My Eyes was supposed to be the story of Giovanna, an emotionally detached girl who is willing to enter a loveless marriage so she can follow her husband to the United States, hoping to escape the confines of a dull Italian village life, and also an account of the shared immigrant experience. I got my hands on this ARC as fast as I could, hoping to add yet another great read to my list of immigrant-experience books. Thinking of my grandparents all the while, whom I've been pestering with questions about their own settlement in Germany in the 70s since I was seven years old, I couldn't wait to start reading!

Unfortunately, it turned out to be the story of Henry Ford told from a fanboy's point of view instead.

The prose in the initial chapters of this novel is simply marvelous. The unromanticized descriptions of transatlantic travel during the 1910s struck me as well-researched, the stifling gender roles in Giovanna's marriage of convenience as sadly realistic. And then, freshly arrived in that "Promised Land" of America, she moves into the boardinghouse her husband chose... at which part the book turns awful.

Let me tell you, I almost cancelled this read at page 100 - which is something, considering that I've never dnf-ed a novel, optimist that I am. But as pretty as Riva's descriptions are, the contrived dialogues that make up nearly the entirety of the remainding book are definitely not her forte. I found myself skimming the many, many descriptions of developments at Detroit's Ford plant (if I see the name "Ford" printed anywhere again anytime soon, I swear I'll have a stroke and be glad if it takes my vision), discussed between the horde of boarders at Mrs.'s Geigers house, more than one could possibly process. Mrs. Geiger herself contributes a great deal to the word count of You Were There Before My Eyes, every single sentence annoyingly written out in exaggerated German accent, which strangely - and thank god - no one of the other foreign residents seems to possess.

And so, instead of exposing the reader to the aforementioned struggles Giovanna would naturally have to face as a new inhabintant of the US, the author presents us with conversation upon conversation and American holiday upon holiday. She is now confined to the world of housekeeping more than she ever was in Italy. The years pass without a plot within the cocoon of the Geigers' boardinghouse, and nothing happens besides the change of seasons, the only conflict being the utter lack of love and romance between our protagonist and her husband - which I honestly hoped would be less submissive and less of a sexist, emotionless robot, respectively. The slowly developing feelings mentioned in the blurb are, if anything, an afterthought. Atheist, frigid Giovanna could have been a unique character of historical fiction, but proofed content to bide her time as timid wife until the very end. Feminist issues are brushed, but not at all explored. Eventually she succumbs to the patriarchy she tried to flee from, the irony of this obviously escaping her notice.

The degree of assimilation all of the Ford workers and their families go through was a bit disturbing besides, Giovanna and Giovanni so willingly renaming themselves Jane and John probably the weirdest change. I'm not an expert on American society, but immigrants almost completely giving up their heritage for this new place? Doesn't seem likely. In any case, there is more glorification of the United States taking place in this book than I ever thought possible - American customs and traditions are introduced with flourishes and put on a pedestal in an absolutely stilted way. We get it, it's the American Dream, but I would have preferred to see its dark side.

There are tragic events of course - but nothing unexpected. And the seasons keep changing, and the pies keep being baked, and Mr. Henry Ford (I typed the name again, god help me) continues being a rich chauvinist. You Were There Before My Eyes is spared from my one-star rating solely because of its stylistic potential - I suggest anyone who plans to pick it up should alternatively read Middlesex.

Oh dear. I hardly ever give out 1-star reviews ... this is my seventeenth. And it is really with a heavy heart that I have to pin that tiny rating on this book. I'm going to try to review You Were There Before My Eyes without bathing it in strong criticisms or postulating what Riva could've done instead, but forgive me if I dip my toes into those waters here and there. I'll make this brief(ish).

A clearly ambitious undertaking, Riva creates a group of characters whose shoulders must bear the burden of trying to relay the weight of the world for immigrants coming to the United States just before World War I. The American Dream was alive and kicking at this time in our history, and Riva has clearly done her research as her group of immigrants' lives revolves around working for Mr. Henry Ford, who revolutionized both the industrial process and the automobile industry.

However, Riva stands back from the emotional center, and instead is removed and reserved in her tellings of John and Jane, the married couple around whom the story revolves. The lack of a connection I felt to any character was strong and made entering Riva's world very difficult. This was all tell and was really devoid of any show. I never knew what was going on inside the characters because Riva never grants us access. They are held at a distance too far away.

The distance was great and without anything to bridge that gap, Riva instead focused on every aspect of what it meant to work for Ford, to be a housewife in that era (a housewife, incidentally who is not in love with or emotionally connected to her husband, who also feels the same in return), an immigrant in America, and a person whose life is teetering over the ocean as the world goes to war. And this was told at a snail's pace.

Again, all this was told without any emotional compass, nothing was guiding me as the reader. It was just a narrative about plodding on. No task was too mundane to mention, no small hurdle too insignificant to skate past, no holiday was skipped. I was shocked at how boring this was; it all felt like my ebook edition had been scrambled with the Wikipedia entry on Henry Ford, among various other non-fictionalized points.

As a fan of historical fiction in general, this was a disappointment, and one that leaves me with a guilty feeling that, in turn, makes me defiant. Quite simply and sadly, this was a very boring book and I cannot recommend it.

“You Were There Before My Eyes” by Maria Riva is a sweeping novel that spans generations, something akin to Lonesome Dove, Gone with the Wind, or the Kite Runner. The emotional depth of Maria Riva’s writing is extraordinary. The novel takes place at the turn of the 20th century at a time when many Europeans fled their homes and came to America, the land of dreams and opportunity. The largest portion of the story specifically centers in a boarding house in the town of Highland Park, Michigan, This is the town where Henry Ford has just invented the Model T or ‘Tin Lizzie’. The main male immigrant characters have all come to work for Mr. Ford. The story follows this group of immigrants who have left everything for a new and strange country.

This story is an in depth character study of these boarding house immigrants and their roller coaster ride of life. The character development is intricate and as detailed a one as I have seen in a long while. Ms. Riva’s descriptions are wondrous. They allow you to feel like these characters are your friends. Whether they are sitting around the kitchen table or sitting in the living room, you can smell the food, the sweet pungent smell of cigars, picture characters and unwittingly feel like you are in the room with them. You find yourself cheering them on and feeling sad when they are sad. The author’s descriptive writing allows the boarding house, the food and the atmosphere to become characters themselves.

As with most generational novels this story is not action packed and at times seems to move lazily along. Being an novel of historical fiction the amount of history woven in and through the story does not disappoint. The history of the creation, development and growth of the Ford Motor Company is not only voluminous but extremely intriguing. While we never meet Mr. Ford his is unquestioningly the most influential character in this novel. His choices loom ever present in the minds of this group of immigrant employees and their families. I learned so much about the early development of the Ford empire and how its founder become a heroic benefactor to millions of immigrants. It also includes a dark back story of Mr. Ford that I found enraging, disheartening, disappointing and sad. The novel includes major historical events including WWI, the Spanish flu pandemic, the creation of the washing machine, the arrival of the Victrola, the appearance of the radio, the arrival of the telephone, the Depression, women's right to vote, and the start of WWII.

If I had any complaints my first would be renaming two of the main characters. Early on we meet Giovanna who ultimately goes to America with Giovanni. This couple have basically entered into a marriage of convenience. I can’t tell you how many times I had to re-read a portion to see if it was the man or woman who was involved. While they are common Italian names, a better choice should have been made so as not to confuse the reader. Thankfully, although frustration already present, Giovanna and Giovanni become Jane and John to be more Americanized. While much of the story is seen through the eyes of ‘Jane’ I had trouble relating to her. While intelligent, her character is slow to emotional growth.

Many thanks to the Author, Publisher and NetGalley for the ARC and the opportunity to read this book and write my unbiased review.