A pleasing romance that may have readers pining for more love stories, perhaps involving Lucia’s three remaining sisters.
Debut author Johns offers a sweet historical romance in a memorable setting.
In 1960, a young Italian woman named Lucia Chiezzi lives in Frascati, Italy, with her parents, her three sisters, her brother and her aunt. With two of her siblings, Lucia commutes into Rome for work daily, and their beauty sets them apart from other villagers. American-born William Bates sees Lucia on his first morning in Rome, and he’s instantly intrigued. Later, he’s delighted to meet her properly at the Carnivale in Frascati. Their mutual attraction is instantaneous; however, William’s conniving father, Joseph, has summoned him to Italy with his own matchmaking agenda in mind. Lucia’s modest circumstances don’t meet Joseph’s standards, and he’s not one to let others’ feelings affect his schemes. Indeed, his determination to drive William and Lucia apart seems to know no bounds. Eager to protect her family, Lucia ends her relationship with William and enlists the help of her sister Vittoria to keep the family’s apartment, as Joseph wants them to be evicted. In addition, Lucia must cope with her fickle boss, Enzo, whose devotion to her grows apace with her own love for William. Johns creates several deeply affecting characters and settings in this novel. Readers may dream of living in the author’s versions of 1960 Rome and Frascati, with their cobblestone streets, haute boutiques and enticing cafes. The people inhabiting them are also arresting, although the women are perhaps more convincingly drawn than the men, except for Joseph and his sidekick, Mario. That said, Joseph’s selfishness and lack of compassion make him almost a caricature at times and make William seem weak and malleable. All of the Chiezzi women are mercurial and emotional, particularly Lucia and her mother, Esther, although the latter’s spontaneity sometimes comes off as merely wacky. Overall, however, readers will find that this novel offers an appealing sojourn into an engaging time and place.
A pleasing romance that may have readers pining for more love stories, perhaps involving Lucia’s three remaining sisters.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615763606
Page Count: 274
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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