Rebecca Chamian Ribaudo's debut novel, "Crossing Division Street", starts with a moment that immediately puts its main character in an impossible situation.
It is July 1999. Sidone Russo, a successful Chicago attorney, is stopped at a red light in Cabrini-Green when a young girl jumps into her car and begs her to leave. Sidone drives away with the girl, but what happens next is tied to a part of Sidone's own history that she has tried to keep separate from the life she has built.
That setup gives Ribaudo plenty of room to explore a question that runs through the novel: Can someone really leave their past behind?
For Sidone, the answer becomes complicated. She has built her life around independence and her own principles, but her connection to Cabrini-Green reveals a family history that reaches back generations. What begins with one unexpected encounter develops into a much larger story involving family, loyalty, identity and difficult choices.
Ribaudo tells that story across two timelines, moving between Sidone's world in 1999 and the history of the family that came before her. The result is a four-generation story covering roughly a century.
Chicago plays an important role throughout that history. The novel looks at the area once known as Little Sicily or Little Hell and later associated with Cabrini-Green, giving readers a look at the people and communities connected to those places over time.
The book also puts the family's experiences against some of the major events that shaped the twentieth century. Immigration, racial violence, riots, wars and assassinations all become part of the backdrop. But the focus remains on how those larger events affect individual people and the decisions they make.
That is where *Crossing Division Street* becomes more than a story about one Chicago neighborhood.
The novel looks at the ways people identify themselves and the ways other people identify them. For some of the characters, race, ethnicity, nationality and religion are deeply connected to survival. For Sidone, those questions become personal when she has to decide whether revealing something about her own identity could help her in a high-profile adoption case.
She has a choice. She can use the identity she has kept hidden, or she can stick with the principles that have guided her adult life.
Neither option is simple.
Her decision also affects more than her career. The stakes involve her family, an orphaned child, her Sicilian grandfather and the man she loves. Personal relationships and family history become impossible to separate from the choice in front of her.
One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is its treatment of family history. Ribaudo does not present the past as something that simply stays in the past. The experiences of earlier generations have consequences for the people who come later, whether those descendants know the full story or not.
The idea of inheritance runs throughout the book. People inherit more than physical possessions. They inherit names, traditions, beliefs, memories and sometimes secrets. They can also spend years trying to distance themselves from those things.
That conflict is particularly important for Sidone because her adult identity has been built around being her own person. Her family history challenges that sense of independence without necessarily making either side completely right or wrong.
The Chicago setting adds another layer to the story. Neighborhoods change, populations move and familiar places can eventually look very different from the communities that once occupied them. "Crossing Division Street" looks at those changes through the experiences of people whose lives unfolded within them.
The book's title is fitting for a story so interested in boundaries. There are divisions between generations, between communities, between past and present, and between the identity a person inherits and the identity they choose.
Ribaudo also uses the historical material to raise questions about how Chicago remembers itself. A neighborhood can become associated with one particular period or reputation, while the people who lived there experienced something far more complicated.
That makes the family at the center of "Crossing Division Street" important to the larger story. Their experiences provide a personal way into a history that can otherwise feel distant.
The novel does not ask readers to look at history from only one perspective. Instead, it brings together different generations and different understandings of identity, allowing the past to complicate the present.
For readers interested in Chicago history, family stories and questions about where identity comes from, "Crossing Division Street"offers plenty of material to consider. It is also a story about choices: what we reveal, what we keep private, what we inherit and what we decide to do with it.
Ribaudo's debut ultimately leaves Sidone with a question that extends beyond her own circumstances. If the past helped make us who we are, how much of it can we actually leave behind?
"Crossing Division Street" will be published September 29, 2026, by Skyhorse.