However A Place for Us can stand independently as its own book. I heartily recommend reading, Eleni first. I absolutely love this book but I honestly don’t know if it’s because of my own Greek connection, though I don’t think so. Gage also tells of his father’s immigrant experience in the U.S., which has so many similarities to many of the Greek immigrants of the 1980s with whom I worked in diners and restaurants. His immigrant experience is peppered with such sadness but also with hilarious laugh-out-loud mishaps. In A Place for Us, the culture and history of Northern Epirus is interspersed throughout the tale of Gage’s experience as a nine-year-old refugee in the United States. During that time, I was trying to make sense of the area while overcoming my own culture shock and adjusting to marriage.
The book has so much meaning for me and I’m not sure why it took me so long to read it (written in 1989). In this one, there’s a scene that ends the story in July of 1983 which is exactly when I was experiencing Epirus, Greece for the first time as a newly married non-Greek Nifi. A Place for us is the sequel to the book Eleni, which I read twice when it came out in the 1980s.
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