Dangerous Women of Liberty Street

They cut her name down at the door of America. She kept the real one sewn inside her coat, in red thread, where no clerk thought to look.

Sicily, 1870. Four-year-old Violetta Morenzo crosses the Atlantic with her name stitched into the lining of a secondhand coat - a precaution taught by the fierce, unaccountable woman who raised her mother's family and trusted paper less than thread. By the time the ship reaches New York, Violet's mother is buried at sea, her father is dying, and the welcome station has already begun turning her name into something smaller.

Raised inside a Catholic orphanage that prizes obedient, useful girls, Violet learns the difference between the words people use and the things they mean. Charity can mean ownership. Protection can mean a locked door. She is shaped by three women who each survived a world built to use them up: Caterina, who taught her to watch hands instead of mouths; Sister Magdalena, a brilliant, ruined scholar hiding a whole life beneath her veil; and Teresa, the older girl who walked out through an unlatched gate at dawn and proved the walls had a door in them.

At sixteen, Violet follows that door west - to Pittsburgh, a city of furnaces and bargains that does not pretend to love her. What she finds there is not rescue. It is a house full of women who have made survival into a shared language, and the beginning of a life she intends, for the first time, to choose.

A sweeping, richly drawn novel of immigration, inheritance, and the women history declined to record accurately - for readers of Kristin Hannah, Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.