Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
set in Italy. Through a friend, Jan rents a place at a Tuscan villa for a summer, which is owned by an Italian academic who teaches in upstate New York There, she becomes friends with Beatrice, and that friendship will last for decades. Beatrice answers Jan's questions and tells her stories of her family and the villa, especially during WWII. The stories are fascinating. "You like that story?" Beatrice asks. "I give it to you."Valerie Martin is a very well established novelist and "I Give It to
Jan is an American academic and part-time writer. In 1983 she rents an apartment in Tuscany for the summer break in order to work on a biography of Mussellini. The apartment is actually part of a large rural villa, Villa Chiara, which has been the property of the aristocratic Salviati family for generations. Various members of this family are still resident in the main villa, but the family’s fortunes are now dwindling. Beatrice is the driving force behind the family’s efforts to maintain the es...
I know Italy very well, and indeed I know some of the locations mentioned in this novel (Passignano, Lake Trasimeno, Isola Maggiore, Florence). I also know quite a lot of Italian history from the Second World War, so reading that section was interesting. However, I had a lot of problems with the structure of this work - not the back and forth in time, which is very much a feature of contemporary literature, but the question of authorship of parts of the book. I understood Jan's input to the book...
As Beatrice told me stories about her family, I found myself thinking of them as characters in a complex narrative. I think this is one of those books where the blurb doesn't give a good sense of what we're getting: essentially, this is a multi-generational family saga following an Italian family through the twentieth century. The history is slightly displaced as it's partly told as inset narratives in the 3rd person, alternating with the 'present' 1st person where a novelist becomes fascinat
Absolutely breathtaking. Most highly recommended.
This was my first Valerie Martin read and it did not disappoint. Whoa, if you want to escape with a story about a friendship in Tuscany over various decades - this novel is for you. It has sort of a memoir-travelogue realistic feel to it, which drew me in from the start, as if these two were real friends, who had met thru travel & continued to occasionally see one another through visits, travel, & correspondences. The narrator Jan is an American professor in Pennsylvania who rents an out-buildin...
An exceptional book. Jan is an academic who leases an apartment in the Tuscan village during the summers. She plans to spend this vacation writing a biography of Mussolini. However, when Jan arrives in Italy, she meets her hostess, the elegant and beautiful Beatrice. The family of Beatrice has ties to Villa Chiara, a place with a fascinating history. The village played an essential role during the Second World War. I love this book as there were many descriptions of Jan and Beatrice's thoughts.
Jan is an aspiring writer and through a friend rents an apartment in a Tuscan villa for the summer. The owner of the villa is Beatrice who also works as a professor in the states and comes home for the summer. Jan and Beatrice become friends and Beatrice tells Jan a bit of her family history. After telling her particularly outrageous things that had happened she would ask Jan if she liked it and "I give it to you." I didn't feel the close relationship between Jan and Beatrice. When she was not i...
Have you ever dreamed about going to Italy and living in a majestic Tuscan villa? Perhaps real life travel is impossible right now, but if you’re looking for a great armchair escape then this book may just be the one for you – I was immediately smitten by its magnificent setting, and the dark family secrets it promised to uncover. So, did it keep its promise? Partly, yes, partly, no. Let me elaborate. I GIVE IT TO YOU is the story of an American academic and writer, Jan Vidor, who spends a summe...
Im always wary of a writer writing about a writer, but this was a pleasure. Italian countryside, Mussolini, racism, family drama, secrets and an asylum for good measure. It’s a lot. But it’s assembled well and I fell into the storytelling and setting. It was kind of an Under the Tuscan Sun meets historic fiction - perfect summer reading for me.
4.5 stars. In I Give it to You, author Valerie Martin places readers in the same position as the fictional novelist narrating the tale. We are listening in rapt attention as Beatrice doles out captivating nuggets of her family history. In the novel, this occurs over the course of years, and many visits to the Italian countryside. The settings were charming and well-drawn--delightful places to visit! And the voices of the two women at the heart of the novel, both born storytellers, were distincti...
Book 30 of 2020 - I Give It to You"Wow," I said. "That's quite a story.""Do you like it?" she said. "I give it to you."This is a story about a story, which sounds tedious and this easily could have been - but it actually reads very well.The main setting is 1980s Tuscany, just before the agricultural tourism boom that saw Tuscan villas be mass converted into holiday homes, and this aspect does seep into the novel like rolling fog. It’s not the main pinnacle, but it’s a very interesting sub-develo...
This is the story of an aristocratic Florentine family’s fortunes before and after WWII, during Mussolini’s time and in the aftermath of his fall. The Mussolini connection attracts the attention of a young American academic who begins to spend summers in the family’s Tuscan villa as paying guest of an Italian colleague, Beatrice, one of the few remaining members of the once-powerful Salviati family. Beatrice is a vibrant, independent, educated woman who has made her life in America but retains c...
3.5 rounded downAn accomplished novel of family and stories within stories, I Give It To You follows writer Jan as she travels to Italy to stay in a beautiful villa in Tuscany. Here Jan meets her host, Beatrice, a woman who she quickly befriends and who regales her with stories of the villa itself which then lead into tales of her family and its various members. Jan becomes fascinated with these stories - many of which are told in third person within the novel - and later weaves them into a book...
With one caveat, I loved this novel.Jan is an American professor/writer; Beatrice an Italian, educated and working in America, who spends her summers at the family villa in Tuscany. Introduced by a mutual friend, Jan, is invited to visit the villa where Beatrice reveals the background history of her aristocratic family, spanning the war years until the present. Over the years, Beatrice shares these stories and says of each “do you like it?….I give it to you”. This book is a combination travelogu...
I Give It to You (August 2020)By Valerie MartinPenguin Random House, 304 pages.★★★Valerie Martin is among my favorite novelists, but I must give a mixed review to her upcoming I Give It to You. There is much to like about any novel set partly in Tuscany, and Martin has a gift for storytelling, though this time plot lines and plot holes too often overlap. Martin also leaves herself open to charges of class insensitivity. The novel opens in 1983, when Jan Vidor, an English professor at a Pennsylva...
Italian setting brought me here and my goodness, it was such an excellent decision. One lovely summer an American academic named Jan gets to rent out a room in a Tuscan villa. There she is to work on her book about Moussolini but ends up taking a life-long liking to espresso while she listens to stories of war-time fascism and how the volantile political climate has long been affecting Italy and its nobility. Jan’s summer escape tenancy turns into something of a quest for objective truth. Not in...
Interesting book. Just complex enough that I was glad for the small family tree on page 22. And a different sort of plot from the usual stuff. Full of smart and intriguing characters. And a heart breaking ending. Very well done.
The book was ok, I really did like parts of it. But the viewpoint character was uninteresting, and she was more like a shoehorned device to tell the story. Jan just didn't seem necessary. The idea of who owns a story, the the person/people it happened to or the person it was told to, is an interesting idea. But it was not developed well in this novel. The book came across as very defensive. Naming the book "I Give it to You" and listing times the protagonist tells Jan "I give it to you" about a
4.5 stars, rounded up. I expected this book would be a fairly standard 4 stars, possibly dropping to three if the writing wasn't good. Instead, what I found was one of the most fascinating character studies I've read in a long time. I'm not usually all that interested by slow-moving historical fiction, but this will stick with me for a long time. As many other reviewers pointed out, the whole "who owns a story" aspect of this book was barely a plot point, which was disappointing. Still, the mult...