Rating: 
Summary: alone in my opinion?
Review: i was very excited to read this book. the woman who wrote it graduated from the creative writing program at the school i am on exchange at. my hopes were dashed about 50 pages in. i kept waiting for the novel to go somewhere interesting but it never did. aside from the location i felt like i had read it all before... the crazy mother, screwed up dad, displaced, messed-up children... all novel worthy, but not if it isn't at least fresh or well done, and in my opinion, it wasn't. i found the narrative to be highly unsatisfying and scattered in it's presentation. and the ending? bad. bad. bad.
Rating: 
Summary: Hidden Treasure
Review: I won't easily forget this book, which is a story about people and remembering people. The most gorgeous aspect of the writing is how a moment or a feeling becomes perfectly captured in brief, humble lines of prose. Azzopardi does not use long discursive explanations which are so often relied upon by authors. Each character becomes flesh and blood through short paragraphs and careful breaths. The sensitivty of the telling draws you in just as much as the tragedy of the story. I am grateful for writers who seek our imagination via the heart. Azzopardi appears to be one of them.
Rating:
Summary: 5 stars...not given lightly
Review: I've been making an effort to read each of the Booker Prize nominees for this year - this was the second I picked up. Within the first ten pages I was greatly impressed by Azzopardi's use of language and the flow of her sentences. By page twenty I was enthralled by the characters and the narrative. By the time I finished "The Hiding Place" I was as moved as any novel I have ever been fortunate to lay my hands on. This is a tremendous novel that I cannot say enough about. The story of Dol and the family Gauci is often disturbing, but is written so beautifully that I couldn't help but be drawn into the tale. I am a harsh critic of over-sentimentality, and a story like this could have easily spiraled into self-pity. Azzopardi doesn't allow that to happen. She manages to allow the characters to be utterly human, imperfect, and infected. "The Hiding Place" is the best novel I've read in five years.
Rating:
Summary: Pull all the stars down for this one!
Review: If you liked "Angela's Ashes" that's all fine and fabulous, since a review compared these two novels. I hated AA, but loved this book. I ripped through it in three days and was sobbing for the last 70-something pages. I had to stop here and there to marvel at what a talented writer Azzopardi is. Okay, the narrator is Dolores, who for reasons I won't spoil here, was burned in a fire at age one month. This is what she says of her burned hand. Luca is her sister. "I used to think my hand would grow back. I'd watch for signs. At night, I'd will the fingers to sprout, eating up the vacant space like a bloom captured on a time-lapse camera. So I know what will and won't grow back, and I know now when Luca is lying." There's a theme running through this book of lost things, absences, silent spaces, and something odd about damaged body parts. I want to say it's Atwoodian (my own word), but I won't. Azzopardi's writing is much more innocent, especially since her narrator is remembering things from childhood on. Although some of her views are bitter, they are never expressed so. You almost wish Dolores had been hardened by her experiences. Growing to love this narrator is painful, because we can't reach into the pages and comfort her. This was such a beautiful book that the conclusion, no matter how satisfying, was unwelcome. A superfantastic effort!
Rating:
Summary: Haunting and Compelling - Hard to believe this is her first
Review: In trying to capture the essence of this book, I find all the adjectives I come up with already present on its dust jacket. Exceptional...Luminous...Lyric...opens up ordinary-looking doors...Ms. Azzopardi has woven a story that we've read before, but the result is fresh and original. She has also managed to create wonderful thumbnail character studies, with each daughter in this family having a distinct identity. Stripped to the essence, yet flowing in detail, the book is filled with repressed memories, some which rise, and others which are too painful to surface.
Rating: 
Summary: A fine first novel
Review: It's a relief to be able to write positively about a first-time novelist. Azzopardi's taken the safest route and written something that is obviously leavened with autobiography. All power to her for that because the characters, the setting and the plot all contain the essential ingredients of life refracted through art. Her style has its own voice without being self-conscious and the novel is carefully constructed without being "artsy", though a few sections in some of the more intensely dramatic moments do flirt with pretentiousness in an effort to make their point. She's one of those rare writers, male or female, who can bring characters of either sex off the page. The self-centred Celesta is as three-dimensional as the shady Joe Medora. You can see Frank, the girls' father with his silk ties and pomade, as clearly as Eva, their mother's friend in her Dusty Springfield eye make-up and gold sandals. The first part of the book covers the author's early childhood years in Cardiff's dockland. Dad's shiftless, mum's a victim. Yes, there are echoes of McCourt, but this book's less about poverty itself and more about character inter-relationship, what people do for love and what happens to them when they're deprived of it, where self-interest leads, and how perceptions can be turned on their heads. Part two, backtracks us through those perceptions thirty years on, using the mother's funeral as a vehicle. This produces an odd change of pace and it seems for a while as if the story has lost its way. There's certainly a sagging of momentum and even though Azzopardi ties it together brilliantly at the end, I sense she struggled with this section. Seams show and for the first time some of the writing feels a little second-hand. Nevertheless it's a fine work from one of the more welcome and genuinely original new voices.
Rating:
Summary: What an Oprah book should be......
Review: Like many Oprah books, this one highlights the travels of a dysfunctional family. What sets it head and shoulders above the rest is the quality of the writing. Ms. Azzopardi's ability to craft sentences, capture the voice of a character, set the scene of a family unraveling around itself is amazing. It's a joy to read an author who writes so well.
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Summary: Un-Welsh Cardiff
Review: Six daughters of an abusive criminal father and a neglectful psychotic mother survive (more or less) childhood in the Maltese community of Cardiff. The narrative technique is unique. The story is told in a series of episodes written in the present tense. They are exactly flashbacks but jump backwards and forwards in time. The effect is like taking old photographs out of a box and looking at them in random order (photographs often figure within the text as if to point out this analogy). Gradually more and more horrific secrets are revealed and the tension builds up. Almost equally distinctive is the community she describes - the cosmopolitan ghetto of the docks area - sharply cut off from the rest of Cardiff, as Cardiff is culturally cut off from Wales. (The picture of Maltese culture is not flattering). Wonderful prose which other reviewers have quoted, but thousands of writers can do wonderful prose. This is something new in fiction.
Rating:
Summary: For those less "literary"
Review: The customer reveiws for this book are excellent. Reading them made me appreciate Azzopardi's skill even more. This reveiw is for those who may not be skilled literary critics or professors of English literature, but who read for the experience of seeing through the eyes of others. For 20 years, I've worked with children and adults who are attempting to heal from the scars of childhood violence. As I read this book, I could only marvel at Azzopardi's depth of knowledge regarding the devastating trauma of child abuse. There were times when I literally flinched as she presented, sometimes very subtley, the horrors of Frank and Mary's parenting. The sisters react with classic responses to their physical and emotional violence- Celesta's detachment, Luca's physical cruelty, Fran's self-mutilating "tattoos," Rosa's mocking cynicism and Dolores'conflicting sense of hope and doom- yet Azzopardi's hypnotic storytelling prevents this from becoming a textbook on abuse. We become each sister as we explore the depths of their terror and we understand, from the inside out, their need to survive at any cost. This is, without any doubt, the best novel I have read in many years.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful Debut!
Review: The Hiding Place is divided into two parts: the first part traces the tragic fall of the Gauccis' family as seen through the eyes of 5-year-old Delores, the second part centers on the grownup Delores as she seeks to unite her broken family and to understand the reason for her sisters' 'cruelty' and her mother's madness. Some people have complained about the first person narration during the first half of the novel, stating a disbelief at how a 5-yr-old child could decipher or remember what was going on in her family. But this very slight discrepency was resolved during the climactic last 30 pages of the novel: Delores never did fully understand what was going on because she was only 5 and it was through her older sisters that she learnt of their father's cruelty, how it drove their mother to madness, and how her sisters were protecting the youngest Delores by locking her up in the rabbit's hut, away from their father. This novel is truly wonderful. The author's use of words to describe certain scenes, such as Mary laying her head on the railroad track but the train was running late, is emotionally powerful and will stay on your mind for a very long time.
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