Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

Next book

CARLO'S PIZZA

A compelling tale of pizza, first love, and family loyalty.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

In this nostalgic novel, a teenager starts delivering pizza under dire circumstances.

Seventeen-year-old Vinny Esposito has failed his driving test. In Eatontown, New Jersey, the sympathetic instructor lets him drive home, informing him that he can attempt the test again in three weeks. But at home, Vinny learns that his absentee mother has left for good, without even a note of explanation to him or his teen siblings, Laura and Timmy. With their father deceased, Vinny realizes he must join Timmy in the workforce to help support the family. He takes the Espositos’ old Datsun station wagon to Carlo’s Pizza and applies as a delivery driver. Vinny lies about having his driver’s license and joins the iconic neighborhood establishment. As a consistently hard worker, he impresses his mentor, Anthony, who soon promises him the chance for better pay. Eventually, Vinny begins making mysterious deliveries that involve empty pizza boxes and paper bags that he’s forbidden to peek into. He’s content to make the extra money and not ask questions. Then a letter from a bank arrives at the Esposito home. It says that the siblings must pay $17,000 or lose their house. Vinny unburdens himself to Anthony, who has a plan that might solve his problem—but can the teen avoid the entanglements of a dangerous business long enough to enact it? Ferraro’s novel focuses a loving eye on that staple of American culture, the family-owned Italian restaurant. Carlo’s has “plastic red and white checkered tablecloths” and wobbly tables that people forgive because the food is so good. Readers also learn of the restaurant’s sketchier dealings, the details of which play into Hollywood tropes of Italians as mobsters with hearts of gold. Certain elements, like the “rich douche” Billy Muscowski, feel rendered more to scratch the author’s nostalgic itch than serve the plot. But Vinny’s relationship with Anna Fanzotti, his forbidden first love, adds a mythic dimension to the protagonist’s heroic feats. Tonally, there is much to draw in the audience, especially the plot’s compact handling of Shakespearean-tinged romance and tragedy. By the end, readers will crave more from Vinny.

A compelling tale of pizza, first love, and family loyalty.

Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022

ISBN: 9798367131420

Page Count: 351

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023

Next book

INDIVISIBLE

An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.

A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.

Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.

An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away. (Fiction. 14-18)

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 58


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2014


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

WE WERE LIARS

From the We Were Liars series

Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 58


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2014


  • New York Times Bestseller

A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.

Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.

Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)

Pub Date: May 13, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014

Close Quickview