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What Members Thought
This book had me gripped from the cover (it's gorgeous, no?). What I found inside the pages was a story that pulled me in. This is the kind of book that you read when you know that you have long periods of time to take a lot of the book all at once because you want to figure out what's happening. Since we're in vacation season now, I could see it being a great beach book. It's not all fluff. There's a good story there and there's enough intrigue to get you sucked right in.
This story has it all. ...more
This story has it all. ...more
Even though I loved Citizen Vince, and greatly enjoyed Walter's books The Zero, and The Financial Lives of Poets, for some reason I resisted picking this up. Something about the cover and the blurb about a romance in the 1960s just didn't seem appealing to me -- too commercial I think. But I'm glad I finally did read it, because it's a pretty funny and warm story that manages to handle two very disparate locations and sets of characters in a way that's engaging without quite becoming too cute fo
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Jess Walter is an excellent writer, but I'm not sure the story here measured up to his talent. The core story -- about an American actress arriving in a tiny Italian town near the Cinque Terre in 1962 -- was diluted by so many of the other characters' stories. I don't think it added much to the book to spend so much time with Claire the development assistant and Shane the writer/failure/would-be-translator, for example. At the beginning it seemed like they would be more important than they turne
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This is the story of Pasquale, who as a young man in Italy, meets an American actress who's been packed off by her studio due to pregnancy. It moves back and forth in time between the days around their original meeting, and when Pasquale travels to the US to find her decades later. I enjoyed this novel, and the way that the character's stories slowly intertwined.
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High 3
Walter has risen to my short list of favorite authors. This is a wonderful read.
This was an absoluely wonderful story - sweet and real, and told with grace. Moving from the present and the west coast and the past and the coast of Italy, every situation and character felt real and vital.
Jul 08, 2012
Kirstin
marked it as to-read
Oct 30, 2012
Cole
marked it as to-read
Dec 19, 2012
Arlene Caruso
marked it as to-read
Jul 19, 2013
Nora
rated it
liked it
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review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction,
rj-julia-recommended
Sep 04, 2013
Rasika
marked it as to-read
Aug 30, 2025
Jess
marked it as to-read
