A review by timsa9cd0
I Give It to You by Valerie Martin
4.0
What an interesting read, and a structure I haven't stumbled across before. The most powerful character in the novel is the fictional novelist Jan who, in a fashion, writes the novel we read. The "unreliable narrator" is taken to a different level ... or levels. Not that there is any reason to not believe her story but there is the filter of the fictional novelist between us and Valerie Martin. And we know nothing more about Jan at the end of the novel than we did at the beginning.
With that purposeful imbalance attached to the book I found myself never able to complete fall into the trance of the stories of the Salviati family, mostly told to Jan by Beatrice ("Bee-ah-tree-chay"), a terrific character whose stories make up the bulk of the novel (the remaining sections of the novel are the stories Jan tells us of her time involving Beatrice and the Salviati family which, inevitably, color Beatrice's stories). Great stories (even if a few of them were a stretch for me to buy) and combined in ingenious ways. In the end, it was a fun read, and all the levels of stories, and stories of stories, zipped me through the book. And surprising to the end.
I don't know Valerie Martin's earlier novels but I'll be looking for them (and I hope one is that Mussolini novel that Jan mentions).
With that purposeful imbalance attached to the book I found myself never able to complete fall into the trance of the stories of the Salviati family, mostly told to Jan by Beatrice ("Bee-ah-tree-chay"), a terrific character whose stories make up the bulk of the novel (the remaining sections of the novel are the stories Jan tells us of her time involving Beatrice and the Salviati family which, inevitably, color Beatrice's stories). Great stories (even if a few of them were a stretch for me to buy) and combined in ingenious ways. In the end, it was a fun read, and all the levels of stories, and stories of stories, zipped me through the book. And surprising to the end.
I don't know Valerie Martin's earlier novels but I'll be looking for them (and I hope one is that Mussolini novel that Jan mentions).