Soccer balls putter down dusty streets, classmates forage through dumps for toys, while friends carry on inexplicably hopeful conversations in bread lines. This extraordinary memoir captures the essence of cultural dislocation and hope. Guruianu eloquently conveys the impact of immigration on his family, contrasting the hardships of Ceausescu's Romania with the challenges of adaptation to the United States. But in the end it is Guruianu's lyric and earnest voice that hits home in Metal and Plum, titled so aptly for its juxtaposing of unlike worlds and how much it hurts the heart when you go home and find that the place you knew is no longer there. —James Stafford, Assistant Professor of Writing, Ithaca College
East smacks up against west and past smacks up against present in this vivid, sensory memoir in which Andrei Guruianu attempts to reclaim a Romanian childhood left behind when he moved to the U.S. at age ten. Here he gives us glimpses of that childhood of ”bone-dry afternoons, dust settled in hair” and bullets pummeling the church where he hid with his family on Christmas Eve during the Romanian Revolution. But in the end it is Guruianu’s lyric and earnest voice that hits home in Metal and Plum, titled so aptly for its juxtaposing of unlike worlds and how much it hurts the heart when you go home and find that the place you knew is no longer there. —Elizabeth Cohen, author, NYT Notable Book of the Year The House on Beartown Road
This extraordinary memoir captures the essence of cultural dislocation and hope. Guruianu eloquently conveys the impact of immigration on his family, contrasting the hardships of Ceausescu’s Romania with the challenges of adaptation to the United States. His family’s search for a better life is deeply moving. Questions about memory, family relationships, and the nature of home arise throughout the book. An unforgettable study of struggle and survival. —Elizabeth Tucker, Professor of English at Binghamton University
