Rating: 
Summary: Such a good book
Review: As difficult as this book was to read at times, I found it to be a truly exceptional novel. Each daughter comes to terms with their horrible past in a different way - from denial to trying to discover the truth. The truth behind the family is revealed gradually in a way that shows things are not necessarily what they seem. I consider this to be one of the best novels I have read in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: wonderful
Review: As in the big world of prizes, The Hiding Place was also shortlisted for our book group's summer selection. I'm glad it wasn't chosen for our discussion as it left me a bit speechless. T.A. gives you a perfectly drawn world. Her talented writing does not require long discursive explanation (yet the story is far from short). Anyone who appreciates the work of writers like Virginia Woolf would be touched by this novel, which analyzes memory and human nature. It has been described as a book about child abuse but more accurately, it's a book about people and remembering people. I won't forget this one.
Rating:
Summary: A spectacular break with the usual bonds of narration
Review: Azzopardi has taken the narrative device of Tristram Shandy or Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and used it to delve deeply into the pain of the human psyche. We see a child, Dolores, from before she is born, but instead of being welcomed into the world, her birth corresponds with the end of life as the rest of her family has known it. Her father, mistakenly believing he has finally sired a son after five daughters, gambles away everything he has. Then when he wants to gamble more, he takes away his wife's painstakingly saved funds, at the same time one of her sisters burns down the house; the mother has begun her descent into madness and forgets Dolores, who is so badly burned she loses a hand. The cost of all this is one of her sisters, whom she never knows. In turn, each of her sisters is lost, and her parents lost, in some way, until Dolores is adopted and spends thirty years away from them all. Her mother's death brings her back, and all the family secrets are revealed, and so too are all the bonds that hold the family together and yet devour them at the same time. To me, the key is the contrast between the prose, which is light, and the events described, which range from arranged marriage without love to arson to child battering to selling a child into prostitution. It's the kind of book that makes you want to scream at the characters, "Don't do that!" and also the kind of book that makes you want to stop and think and re-read passages again and again. That it's a first novel is simply amazing.
Rating:
Summary: A TRENCHANT, SUPERBLY CRAFTED DEBUT
Review: British first-time novelist Trezza Azzopardi stuns with her accomplished portrait of childhood deprivation, a terrain where want goes begging and kindness is stillborn. With a rundown immigrant enclave in Cardiff, Wales, as its setting, The Hiding Place is the story of the Gauci family. Father Frankie, whose "love is Chance" is a Maltese seaman. A selfish, unrepentant child abuser and thief, he values an inherited ruby ring more than his daughters whom he barters for a stake. His wife, Mary, the mother of six girls, is sometimes forced to sell herself for rent money. Madness is her escape from an intolerable existence. Related in the voice of the youngest child, Dolores, the saga of this family causes readers to ponder the vagaries of birth and life's inequities. As adults, each daughter is haunted by a painful past, days in which their diversions were hopscotch in a dusty alley or inflicting cruelty upon one another until they are relegated to foster care. Ms. Azzopardi's evocation of the littered byways and musty bars of a small dockside community is flawless, as are her portraits of those we meet there. A finalist for the coveted Booker Prize, The Hiding Place is a trenchant, superbly crafted tragedy. It is a bleak but dazzling book.
Rating:
Summary: compelling read
Review: I don't get to read a book from cover to cover very often but Azzopardi's debut novel kept me hooked from the start. Her writing is absolutely beautiful. Her words carve out the extreme emotions and upheavals the characters face on a daily basis. It was so easy for me to become each character and secretly feel their pain through the imagery and circumstances the writer created. I wasn't just reading words, I was experiencing the sorrow, the pain and the heartbreak. This was a very very sad story about families, breakups and rejected and dejected children. The hiding place is a novel that would have to be read more than once to get the full meaning out of it. The first read to enjoy Azzopardi's brilliant prose and the second to understand what lays beneath.
Rating: 
Summary: Antipasto
Review: I found this first novel, by a creative writing program graduate, to be readable but thin. The motivation and inner life of the principal characters are hardly developed, though that may be the author's point: Ms. Azzopardi appears to be primarily interested in the ambiguity of the central characters' separate attraction to flight and, with minor exceptions, in the numb isolation of their daughters. If so, for me, it is a low-calorie premise. The author creates a pretty good sense of time and place dependent too much, for my taste, on food descriptions. Unfortunately, her style is neither especially realistic nor magical nor lyrical nor driven by psychology. It is just there, just craftsmanlike. Life down on the docks of Cardiff, with Maltese immigrants scratching out a living, turns out to be not much different from life in, say, Hoboken in the 1950s. In the category of atmospheric, family-descriptive first novels, I enjoyed The God of Small Things and The Joy Luck Club far more.
Rating:
Summary: We'll see this author again....
Review: I just finished reading "The Hiding Place" and I highly recommend it. The book was hard to put down, you just wanted to continue to see what would happen to Dol next. Very compelling story, sad, realistic, heart wrenching at the end--but a great story. This book is truly a gem, and I am glad I took a chance on reading it, it's one of those great books you just happen to come across every so often.
Rating:
Summary: What a Joy to Read - Finally a well crafted work!
Review: I love to read, I read all the time - and just today finished The Hiding Place. I love the manner inwhich Trezza constructs a paragraph/sentence. . . her use of colourful descriptives, her ability to wend past & present artfully together.
I can't wait for her next book!
Rating:
Summary: Terrific First Novel
Review: I read The Hiding Place last year and reread it last week. Second reading or first, I still became tearful at the end of this remarkable book. The book is about the Gauci Family of Cardiff, Wales, as seen through the eyes of Dolores, the youngest of 6 daughters. The father, Frankie has been compared to Frank McCourt's father in Angela's Ashes, but the comparison is weak. While McCourt's father, an alcoholic, neglected his family, Frankie Gauci is a sadistic, abusive man who is unable to experience human relationships except in terms of his own material needs. He is a gambler, a wife, child and animal abuser; a person to whom lying, cheating and betrayal is as natural as breathing. Dolores' story of her family is spoken in the present tense. This technique allows the reader to relate more closely to the horrors, secrets and disintegration of her family. The reader is experienceing the story rather than merely reading about it. The first part of the book follows Dolores from birth to about 5 years old. Obviously a very young child could never recall the events Dolores describes. It is unclear how she gains her knowledge of her parents' meeting and marriage, how she is disfigured or everything else she describes in painful detail. Perhaps the horrors of a childhood are more easily recalled. But no matter, Ms. Azzopardi's evocative writing, her compelling story and the characters who inhabit this book push you behond the need to explain this all rationally. The second part of the book takes place about 30 years later when Mary Gauci dies and 4 of her daughters reunite for the first time in the old family home. Secrets are revealed and Ms. Azzopardi uses this reunion to tie up loose ends. Each daughter has grown into a distinct individual, each having introjected a piece of her dysfunctional parents. There is a recognition of their sisterhood, but each is presented as emotionally isolated from the others. The Hiding Place is a painful but rewarding novel. The writing is beautiful. The author's technique of going back and forth between past and present never interferes with the story. It is done smoothly and actually heightens the tension. Highly recommended for the writing and the emotional experience.
Rating:
Summary: A Feast for the Senses
Review: I was reminded of the memorable opening of Faulkner's story "Barn Burning," in which the little boy protagonist is present while his father is accused of malicious arson; the first sentence: "The store in which the Justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese." The narrative point of view is that of a naïve witness; one might say naïve voyeur. Adult crime, adult atrocity, is filtered through the five senses of a hungry child. The child, even though abused (and because abused), cannot pass judgment on his own dysfunctional kin. Azzopardi's bears comparison with Faulkner not only because they share a limiting point of view, but also because both record in intense detail the sensory world of their protagonist. This technique is not new; it's Huckleberry Finn's point of view. But Azzopardi, to my mind, excels Faulkner by avoiding his departures into highfalutin editorializing but also by accepting the rigors of the present tense, which has both the artistic limitations and the immediacy of film - if film could also capture the sound of a rabbit being gutted, the acrid smell beneath the perfume, the watery taste of blackberries, the texture of mud and concrete and old linoleum. One might be reminded of Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy," an experiment in objectively description fiction; but while Robbe-Grillet's attention to detail seems obsessive, even solipsistic, Azzopardi's story is set in a world whose characters are as richly diverse as any in Dickens and as psychologically complex as any in modern fiction. They are frightening. They are lovable. Yes, readers will be deeply moved by the humanity of the tale - its horror and its humor - but it is Azzopardi's language, her handling of the emotionally-charged image, her ability to capture a place, a time, a person in a totally original turn of phrase that suggests that this first novel is a remarkable accomplishment. Even though hard to put down, "The Hiding Place" is not an "easy read"; but it invites comparison with the works of major novelists. One reader wondered if this would be a "one-off" success; we hope it won't be. The challenge to Trezza Azzopardi must be daunting. But very encouraging. For lovers of both literature and life, "The Hiding Place" is compulsory reading.
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