Tag: Books: Italian

Sogni Perduti (Lost Dreams)

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Sogni Perduti
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, Book # 1
Amazon KDP
October 20, 2018
ebook
422
Italian
March 14, 2020 March 17, 2020

An adventure that has already conquered over a million readings on the web.
According to Ms. Flint, they had to find a summer job. And officially this was their intention.
As if Aran and Cora could have even imagined stealing a necklace, involving poor Fez and crossing the continent. All this to attend the biggest event of the last few years, but they had decided to put their heads in place, they had said it clearly and only the right-minders could have guessed the opposite. The righteous ... and Elidana. Because she always has something to complain about.
Get ready to live a fantastic journey, between warriors, fortified cities and stones full of light.

About the book

Sogni Perduti (“Lost Dreams” no English version) is the first book of the Crystallum saga, by an Italian author who kindly gave his ebook for free for a limited period of time due to the coronavirus. In fact, given the restrictions, most of the population found themselves locked in the house with nothing to do. So Giovanni decided to make his book free to help us get through this situation and for this I thank him with all  my heart. (Who knows if everything will be over when I post this review… spoiler alert, it’s not…)

But what is this book about? It’s a fantasy so we’re in a very particular imaginary world. At the beginning we are in Lud, in the republic of Lamia, where our five protagonists live, teenagers who have different situations behind them and I must say that I liked the story in which Cora and Aran know each other. Cora (a boy, male, honestly at first I thought it was a female, but immediately I saw the masculine pronoun and therefore I understood that it was a male; dear author, you will explain to me the reason for this name one day – well, Andrea is a masculine name for us Italians, but it is feminine elsewhere…), however, Cora is the protagonist and together with Aran and Fez, wants to participate to a race in the capital of the Karzhan Kingdom, Edel, and to do this they need money. To find it, they decide to use the necklace of Aran’s mother which has a sphere that was once “full” of energy. In fact in this world there are spheres that can contain energy and that are highly sought out. The boys think that by placing the necklace near a famous tree in the city, the great Jalme, they can infuse energy into the sphere which they would then exchange for money. But an accident happens and Cora falls between the roots of the tree and remains unconscious for two days. But the three do not give up their trip out of town and when Cora wakes up they leave. The three will be joined by two girls, Elidiana and Marmorel. However, Cora has a second goal, he wants to find his father who was a Karzhanian soldier and so he goes to Edel both for the race and to find some clues. All this without saying anything to his friends.

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Otter Creek Lost Girls (Le ragazze perdute di Otter Creek)

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Le ragazze perdute di Otter Creek
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Self Published
May 3 2018
ebook
331
Italian
May 27, 2019 June 11, 2019

Vermont, January 1988.
Nine-year-old Sean Grayson is found stunned in the woods near his home, while his little sister Kelsie, six and a half years old, has mysteriously disappeared.

Thirty years later, circumstances bring Sean back to the area where Kelsie has vanished. In that context, he comes into contact with evidence linking his sister to a series of girls whose disappearances remain an unsolved mystery. It is therefore possible that Kelsie may have been one of the victims of a serial killer known as "the killer of Otter Creek".

Stephanie Callahan, a former journalist and best-seller author, is commissioned by her agent to investigate the disappearances for a possible new book. He needs to find out if the notorious Otter Creek killer could be anything more than a local legend. This is the last chance for Stephanie to bring her failed career back on track and face her personal demons.

But discovering the secrets of the past can have dangerous consequences. Sean and Stephanie are being dragged into a web of deceit, lies and murders. A network that has lasted intact for more than forty years, and that still does not cease to trap its victims.

When their destinies cross each other, Sean and Stephanie will have to learn that digging into the secrets of the past can bring out much more than truth.

About the book

Otter Creek Lost Girls (directly translated from the Italian title, no English version for now), is a novel written by Phil Kansel of whom very little is known. He doesn’t have a profile on Goodreads.com, he isn’t on Wikipedia and apparently he doesn’t have a website, twitter or facebook or he doesn’t advertise them. Goodreads.com says that he wrote at least 9 books but that they aren’t translated in English despite the author’s name is not Italian (but this is not a problem, many Italians do not have Italian names). Furthermore, this book is set in America.

The story is about missing girls, cases that aren’t investigated because as soon as a certain person is named, everything disappears. Everything revolves around Sean’s family, who at 9 years is found lying in the snow. At the same time his younger sister disappears. What is behind this disappearance? And the other girls? Where did they go?

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L’ultimo segreto di Galileo (The Last Secret of Galileo)

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L’ultimo Segreto di Galileo
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Leone Editore
2014
ebbok
352
Italian
--
July 1, 2018 June 6, 2018

The microbiologist Rebecca De Cardinale is involved by Professor Spinelli and his assistant Alessandro Vinci in the search for Galileo's last missing book, in which it is said that the illustrious astronomer theorized a link between epidemics and the movements of meteorites. The clues to find the manuscript are contained in three letters of Galileo found by Spinelli, but when the professor disappears Rebecca and Alessandro take charge of the research, in a relentless struggle against time to prevent a catastrophic epidemic from affecting the entire humanity.

About the book

I haven’t read any Italian authors for years, I don’t know why I don’t consider the plots at all when I see that the author has the same nationality, maybe I find them not macabre, so I still have to find that author who lets me say “wow this which is a real good book”.

In this book we travel around Italy, looking for a book that was most probably written by Galileo in which he explained his theory of astral motions by linking it to epidemics.

In general, I liked the story except for some things.

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Heart

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Heart
Cuore
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Fredonia Books (NL)
1886
Paperback
274
Italian
Isabel Florence Hapgood
March 18, 2018 March 21, 2018

Written following the Italian war for independence by a sub-lieutenant who had fought in the siege of Rome in 1870, Heart is the fictional diary of a boy's third year in a Turin municipal school. It was written to foster juvenile appreciation of the newfound Italian national unity, which the author had fought for in the recent war. The book is often highly emotional, even sentimental, but gives a vivid picture of urban Italian life at that time. A master, introducing a new pupil, tells the class, "Remember well what I am going to say. That this fact might come to pass--that a Calabrian boy might find himself at home in Turin, and that a boy of Turin might be in his own home in Calabria, our country has struggled for fifty years, and thirty thousand Italians have died." The novel became internationally popular, and has been translated into over twenty-five languages, and is part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908) established a reputation as a writer in various genres after his experience as a soldier.

About the book

This is a book that when I was a child everyone told me “read it”, “it’s a beautiful book for kids” and now that I read it, I wonder how is it that a book so “out of the Italian language” being for children? I need to say that I read this book just because, for the Challenge of Popsugar, I had to read “a book from my childhood that I wanted to read and I never read”, otherwise, as I said on Goodreads where I added all the books that I own, I would have never read it.

First of all, the book was written in the nineteenth century so obviously the Italian is not the Italian of today, so I wonder how a child/boy who has just started his journey in the Italian language can fully understand what is written. Not all the book is like that but if it is not fluent for me because of ancient Italian, how can it be for a boy? How can a child like this book? Now I know why I never read it when I was young, as soon as I started it I gave up.

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