I'd say YES ! But I'm biased !!!
In a previous thread I had mentionned the movie they made after it with Sofia Loren, it was called "The Immigrant" over here if I remember well. You really should look for it as well.

SUMMARY :

The widowed Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo of this beautiful novel combines a great nourishing maternal love with the equally great shrewdness of a vixen and toughness that the contadini call "figatu" ("guts", from "fegato", meaning liver). She is the quintessential immigrant Italian-American mother. Confrontations on the question of male-female relationships between her and her 18-year-old daughter Octa via are typical. Octavia is a girl lashed both with the cultural conflict of the second generation and the sexual conflicts of a virgin grown to maturity.

As the years pass, Octavia comes to realize that the most formidable human being she knows is this mother of hers with her deceptively simple verbalizations. Regarding the question of how to raise O's younger siblings, the mother said to the disgust of the sophomoric daughter,
"if you want a house to give orders in, get married, have children, scream when they come out of your belly, THEN you can beat them, then you can decide when they will work and how, and who works."

"Come heavy or not at all." Uncle Junior to Tony S.
"Nenti dire ca nenti si capi" come disse quello. (Say nthg when U know nthg.)
"Chi non ci vuole stare, se ne vada." (If U don't like it here, go somewhere else.)