Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

Book Overview

"Imagine a scene of rural serenity, a night scene." So begins the first chapter of Bradford Morrow's latest novel, Giovanni's Gift. However pastoral this start may seem, in a few short paragraphs,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067087292X
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.4" x 1.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant! Inspired! (At least to my tiny 13 year old mind.)

I loved Mr. Morrow's writing style and prose. Some people say it was boring, but I thought it was just enough to pull you into the book. I found it very suspenseful towards the end, and was somewhat surprised by the ending. I enjoyed the book immensely.

A Remarkably Successful Book

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.

Compelling, well written, good read

I would have rated this book a ten except for the fact that at times it is overdescriptive and slows the tension of the story. That said I must admit as a writer that I was a little green with envy at Morrow's gift of prose. This is a facinating mystery as well as just a well written narrative. This is the first in its genre that I did not feel compelled to try to figure it out until the end, I just let the reading come and enjoyed it a lot

a great book

I read about this book and thought it couldn't be as good as they said it was. It is! I grew up in the West, and the author's way with painting images of the Western landscape just kept sending these little shocks through me, it was so true. Plus there's really good, deep writing about families and a love-story that breaks your heart. It's been a long time since a novel has kept me up at night and caused me to wake in the morning with a sore neck, but Giovanni's Gift did. It's the kind of book you want to give to friends

a riveting whirlpool of a novel

I've never read a book before that so handily blends literary conventions and ends up trumping all of them--part mystery, part travelogue, part gothic, part pedigreed post-modern novel, the book gently draws you in and then snaps shut around you like a bear trap. The author, Brad Morrow, writes like a dream with a beguiling delicacy and precision that belie how deep and dark is the path he's leading you along. I don't want to get any more explicit about the book and give away the plot. I just want to say that I've never read anything like it, and you'll feel the same way, I'm sure. Giovanni's Gift is that rare thing, a book with literary horsepower and a rocking plot. READ THIS BOOK