Good escape reading in this tale of love and tough decisions in Venice.
In Nardin’s romance, a young woman’s life radically changes when she decides to leave America for Venice and a handsome gondolier.
Victoria Greco, 30, leads a busy life as executive assistant to a high-powered Hollywood talent agent and hopes to break into agenting herself. On a rare vacation, Victoria visits Venice, Italy, where a muscular, golden-haired young man named Alvise Moro serves as her gondolier. Although he has a degree in Italian literature, Alvise comes from four generations of gondoliers, and there’s no job he’d rather do. They’re immediately and mutually attracted; though Victoria is usually cautious, she tells herself “I’m on vacation. Why not enjoy a little romance?” Though Victoria doesn’t consider Alvise her dream guy (“The man she’d marry would have to be a successful business man to compliment [sic] her own desired success”), she misses him terribly in California. Before long, one door opens as another closes. Alvise visits and proposes to Victoria just as her boss gives the bad news: no promotion this year. Marrying a man she barely knows, moving to Venice, and giving up her career might not make sense, but “there was no negotiating with the heart.” Naturally, nothing is as easy as Victoria had hoped, and she must tackle several obstacles on the way to giving her heart what it wants. In her well-researched debut novel, Nardin does a fine job evoking Venice’s atmosphere, culture, and history. The particular practices and customs of gondoliering, along with women’s efforts to enter the profession, make for absorbing reading. Victoria’s new job—selling high-end jewelry—is also enjoyably luxurious. Given the highly romanticized love affair, the book benefits from its grounding in realistic conflicts that arise from Victoria’s situation, whether it’s the constant secondhand smoke in Europe, a critical Italian mother-in-law, or dealing with international law. Even so, it’s more than a little hard to accept that an ambitious career woman who’s always valued material success would so suddenly and completely change her plans, giving up a great deal of personal autonomy, privacy, and power.
Good escape reading in this tale of love and tough decisions in Venice.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 979-1-2200259-0-4
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Waterline Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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