Delicately interweaving the bilingual journals of her grandfather (a southern Italian shoemaker), her mother's poetry, Sicilian folklore, and dreamwork with her own story, Mary Cappello writes as witness of the marks left on her family by immigration and assimilation. Night Bloom counters America's obsession with mafiosi at the same time that it exposes the daily violence of grinding poverty. As a lesbian who has entered the middle class, Cappello celebrates the subversive desire in her immigrant family's responses to the forces shaping their lives, and in the Catholic icons, television superheroes, and disco divas with whom she identified as a child.