by Jess Walter
I would like to think I'm not a pushover for a five-star review. "I call it like I see it," is the way I go about it. Even my favorite series of books, the Patrick O'Brian Master and Commander series, does not get five stars throughout. I think, though, I'm a real sucker for graceful craft, where th...
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks on over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soo...
3.5 star read - A very good read, but the first two chapters were a bit slow. Everything ties together nicely after that point.
Beautiful Ruins is a revelation: it contains shimmering prose and a life-affirming message. Spanning 50 years and two continents, it asks some tough questions about how to define success and happiness in our media-driven, celebrity-obsessed culture. It artfully encompasses such disparate events as t...
I’m not often as thoroughly captivated by a novel as I was by Beautiful Ruins, and that makes it challenging to articulate my response to something more than “I loved it!” but I’ll try. I’m sure Jess Walter’s writing would have captured me on its own--and having read this, I’m now that much more det...
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