PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewCercas’s \'nonfiction novel,\' first published in Spanish in 2017, presents an altogether more unsettling challenge for politically correct readers — as it must have done for the author himself ... his reconstructions are tied pretty closely to known historical fact, and there’s no question but that he invested a staggering amount of time and effort in digging up what little there was to be known ... Non-Spaniards will likely want to skip its more detailed accounts of the war. But Cercas keeps his readers curious to the end.
Roberto Saviano, Trans. by Antony Shugaar
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIt is raw and shocking, revelatory stuff. And the author knows how to keep his narrative hurtling forward like the scooters his young hoodlums ride at life-endangering speeds through the back streets of Naples ... But what is lacking in Saviano’s otherwise dexterous work is motivation — a surprising omission for a writer who has become a hero of the left ... Frustratingly absent is any hint of what turned Saviano’s antihero, the gang leader Nicolas Fiorillo, into an amoral killer.
