Generally I have liked all Richard Russo books. This is a short story or what Amazon calls a Kindle Single. It is interesting to see how Russo approaches a shorter story. I read a lot of short stories. They have to build rapidly. This short story or Novella does not. From the beginning it feels like a longer novel and then it stops. I am not sure this is Russo's thing. That said, Russo is a good writer and it is a small time investment so I would say go for it read it and enjoy. Several people who have reviewed this book have said that this is their first Richard Russo book and they enjoyed it a lot. To those people, I say try some of his others, because in my opinion he is one of the best authors out there, but this is not one of his gems. I did enjoy the character development and some sentences and paragraphs were pure genius, but the story did not captivate me like "Nobody's Fool" or "Empire Falls" two of my favorite books of all time. I missed the feeling of being in Venice, I really didn't feel that at all, but I loved the difficult relationship he had with his brother and the other characters in the book filled in the background nicely. I had the feeling in the end that their relationship was moving in the right direction, but this book was really not memorable to me.
