Washington Post Book World reviewer Donna Rifkind today reviewed Jenny McPhee’s A Man of No Moon, a book “cloaked in the noir ambiance of postwar Italy.” Rifkind gives the plot and character development mediocre reviews. But, she also gives accolades to McPhee’s handling of Moon’s real protagonist: Italy.
“Foremost among those virtues is the novel’s rich variety of atmospheric settings, from film-industry salons in Rome in the late 1940s, glittering with celebrities, to the ‘dark, quivering canals’ of Venice, where somewhere nearby, Hemingway is rumored to be staying; from a lonely villa on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, in which Dante takes refuge during difficult times, to the volcanic Aeolian Islands, where two rival films are being shot simultaneously by legendary directors, and near whose shorelines, after dark, “bright light, voices, laughter and the pealing clarinet of Benny Goodman ricocheted from yacht to yacht.”
Maybe this is a good stocking stuffer for the Italophile in your life? If so, you can get the book here.
