When Ida reaches adulthood, she moves away from her all-American small town to California. There, the family struggles to assimilate amid anti-Italian attitudes among their neighbors. Later in her youth, her family relocates from their tight-knit immigrant community to a wealthier predominantly non-immigrant neighborhood. She experiences a challenging upbringing during the Great Depression while developing many survival skills as she faces ethnic prejudice, language barriers, economic hardship, and intolerance toward her family's Roman Catholic faith. In the Italian immigrant community in which they reside, many of the customs of the old country persist. Over the next few years, Serafino and Maria have five daughters and one son: Ida, Leonata, Bice, Mafalda, Algisa, and Raffaello. They obtain company housing provided by the Iowa cement quarry where Serafino gains employment. The son of an Italian migrant worker, Serafino Di Gregorio defies his father, moving to America in the 1910s with his wife, Maria.

Part 1, 'Newcomers,' details the immigration of Godges’s maternal grandfather from Italy to America. 'This ambitious book succeeds in negotiating the balance between individual and community, telling the engrossing story of an individual family within the greater society of America' ( Kirkus Reviews).

In his memoir Oh, Beautiful (2010), a narrative that spans a hundred years and three generations, American author John Paul Godges details the immigration of his grandparents, the assimilation of his parents, and his siblings' efforts to navigate the turmoil of the last half of the 20th century.

Oh, Beautiful by John Paul Godges