Rating: 
Summary: Just couldn't stay awake
Review: Set in a richly described but unnamed Western town, the lead character, Grant, comes home to visit his aunt and uncle who live there. He is in his early thirties, divorcing his wife, and looking for a place he can call home. His aunt and uncle have been receiving mysterious night visits by someone setting out to intimidate them, and the book's intention is to unravel this mystery. The title, Giovanni's Gift, refers to a cigar box full of mementos that Giovanni, a friend of the uncle, leaves behind when he dies. The reader immediately suspects there was a murder. The box is an allegory to Pandora's box and as Grant discovers the meaning of each item in the box, the story becomes more complex, especially since Grant falls in love with Giovanni's daughter. The preservation of the land is another subplot and the author constantly veers off the story with poetic metaphorical language to make this point over and over again. I do have to applaud the author though for his skill with words and for having whatever it took to be recognized in the publishing world. I think he says a few important things about the environment. But I just couldn't stay awake.
Rating:
Summary: Just couldn't stay awake
Review: Set in a richly described but unnamed Western town, the lead character, Grant, comes home to visit his aunt and uncle who live there. He is in his early thirties, divorcing his wife, and looking for a place he can call home. His aunt and uncle have been receiving mysterious night visits by someone setting out to intimidate them, and the book's intention is to unravel this mystery. The title, Giovanni's Gift, refers to a cigar box full of mementos that Giovanni, a friend of the uncle, leaves behind when he dies. The reader immediately suspects there was a murder. The box is an allegory to Pandora's box and as Grant discovers the meaning of each item in the box, the story becomes more complex, especially since Grant falls in love with Giovanni's daughter. The preservation of the land is another subplot and the author constantly veers off the story with poetic metaphorical language to make this point over and over again. I do have to applaud the author though for his skill with words and for having whatever it took to be recognized in the publishing world. I think he says a few important things about the environment. But I just couldn't stay awake.
Rating: 
Summary: A Remarkably Successful Book
Review: What I find most successful about Giovanni's Gift is Morrow's ability to write a work that is incredibly approachable but which still offers the more literary reader many levels of complexity and allusion: from references to the Pandora myth to reappropriating with Herman Melville's description of reading of Hawthorne. Readers can choose how much to take away--Giovanni's Gift satisfies as story, as a character study, and as a finely constructed structure of language. Morrow's prose contains the only descriptions of Colorado I know of that genuinely take me back there, and he's not afraid to embrace a lyricism that makes these descriptions shimmer and resonate. The sentences are carefully patterned, and Morrow moves with precision and control from the pastoral and the bucolic to playing with conventions of mystery, myth, the gothic, the meditation and other genres, employing a narrator who reveals himself as much by the way he tells his story as by what he tells. Giovanni's Gift is a fine novel, well worth reading.
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