Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Italy

OCCHI BELLI by Tim McDonald – Contemporary Romance, Grief, Italy

Luca Lucchesi had it all—a successful restaurant, a loving wife, an adoring mother. Then it all came crashing down. Occhi Belli by Tim McDonald explores the depths of Luca’s despair, his battle with alcohol, and ultimately his journey back to life—and love.

Luca hadn’t planned to work in the restaurant industry but eighteen years later there he was, what one would call a “lifer.” Time flows differently in the lives of restaurant people, and it flew by for Luca. He was coming up on Occhi Belli’s tenth anniversary but felt like he’d opened it just yesterday. Luca’s vision had been a simple one—to build a great restaurant with great food and great characters. With that goal in mind, he built Occhi Belli into a hugely successful neighborhood gem in north Seattle. He’d poured his life into it and truly loved it, but at what price?

He knows he drinks too much, but it is part of the world in which he lives. So far, he’s been lucky and has never been caught driving after drinking. Then his luck runs out.

He totals his car, is hit with a DUI, and his life begins to unravel. His wife, Lillian, announces she’s had enough and files for divorce. After nine years of watching Luca put his restaurant and alcohol before her and their marriage, she chooses her own well-being over his. But suddenly single at thirty-six, Lillian wonders what she will do next.

Luca stumbles through his days and nights, drowning his feelings with drink and the intoxicating energy of the restaurant until he gets a phone call from his stepdad and must face his greatest fear. His beloved mother Francesca’s battle with lung cancer is at its end. She’s dying. Luca’s father died when he was twelve years old, and since then it had been just the two of them. But over the last ten years, the restaurant had become his priority and he’d not seen her as often as he should have.

Occhi Belli follows Lillian and Luca as they struggle to find their separate ways forward to happiness, meaning, and love.

Luca spends a stint in rehab, but returns to the restaurant and quickly plunges back into his old ways. Unable to face his grief and guilt, he continues to drink away his emotions and memories. Without Lillian or his mother in his life, what does he have to live for anyway? After a particularly painful bender, Luca realizes he has hit rock bottom. He must make a drastic change in his life to survive, so he sells Occhi Belli to his chef, packs up, and moves to Italy to learn how to make wine in the land of his parents.

Luca feels his mother all around him in Italy—watching, judging, disappointed by him. He throws himself into the world of Italian wine and meets the beautiful, seductive, and perhaps slightly dangerous Matilda. When her past eventually finds them, it almost destroys Luca and the love they’ve nurtured.

Meanwhile, Lillian struggles with her own regrets and overwhelming loneliness. She is working too much, sleeping too little, and living her life through her patients.

When her best friend Sarah meets someone, Lillian is happy for her but also envious and afraid she’ll lose the one person who is always there for her. It’s only after Lillian realizes what she most wants that she begins her own new journey toward connection and fulfillment.

Occhi Belli is above all else a story of love and change in the wake of sorrow.

Anyone who loves Italy will recognize the strong passion Tim McDonald has for its mesmerizing beauty and transformative powers. His sumptuous descriptions of food and wine will revel in the joy of taste. As it turns out, Italian wine and Italian love can, indeed, break through grief and loss.

May 7, 2025
A PLACE Of REFUGE: Book Four of First Light by Linda Cardillo – Romance, Historical Fiction, Women’s Literature

Izzy Monroe has lost herself. Three months after an accident that damaged a portion of her brain, she isolates herself in her parent’s home on Chappaquiddick Island, on the eastern end of Martha’s Vineyard.

She has spent her life in the world of academia, working on a doctorate in literature at Harvard, but now with her short-term memory gone, she has to give up her dreams. Her emptiness and doubt have left her rudderless and deeply depressed.

When her former college roommate, Maria, suggests she intern at Portarello, Maria’s grandfather’s self-sustaining farm in the Italian countryside, Izzy isn’t immediately convinced she can make the journey alone much less work at the successful inn and thriving farm. However, Izzy remembers the peace she felt there on the one visit she and Maria made years ago, and she knows this is her only chance to regain any sense of normalcy.

Daniel Richetelli, a Jesuit priest and Maria’s cousin, is facing a crisis himself. After ten years of self-sacrifice, he has lost his faith and is desperate to find a new path.

He knows his grandfather can help him find his way, so he leaves the Church and goes to Portarello. A chance encounter with Izzy leaves him reeling. In her, he feels he has found that for which he is searching, but the guilt of his physical attraction to her and the criticism of his sister, Linda, make him once again question who he really is. Meanwhile, Izzy hasn’t felt so much like her old self since the accident. The farm and Daniel are bringing her back to life, but she fears his past will forever stand in the way of their happiness.

The search for self is the central theme of the novel.

Izzy remembers the strength she had prior to the accident. She was adventurous and outgoing, a lifelong learner. Not even a disability left over from her bout with childhood polio could keep Izzy down. Half-Wampanoag, half-Irish, Izzy was a warrior from the beginning. She was fearless. Now, she knows she is hiding from this new Izzy, a woman who doubts herself and cannot see past her brain damage to the new life she must build. She is scared to risk the possibility of failure and pain, but Maria convinces her she cannot rediscover herself without taking the risk.

When she does finally gather the courage to leave her hovering, protective family, she thinks she must keep her inability to remember a secret from the other interns and Maria’s family. She hopes to reinvent herself among strangers and the physical labor of farm life. That journey to self-discovery feels like stepping off the edge of the world, and finding to courage to take that step is a part of reclaiming her life.

Though she cannot truly interact with the other interns or inn guests because of her memory, she plays the part in yet another step toward normalcy.

Izzy is amazed by the power she finds in physical labor. Working in the vegetable gardens and tending to the pigs form a sense of connection as her brain begins to heal and form new pathways. This also leads to a deeper appreciation for her Native American heritage, a deeper contemplation of the natural world – a world so foreign to her after years spent in study and academics.

Her immediate attraction to Daniel and the physical relationship they share also give her purpose.

United in their vulnerability, the two draw on and strengthen each other. Daniel’s path to the farm began with a forced leave of absence from the Church. He struggles with Jesuit ideology to find God in everything. In fact, he can find his maker in nothing recently. He is not looking forward to the mental grilling his grandfather will give him, but he knows it is the only way to truly rediscover himself. He lacks Izzy’s courage, though, and doesn’t immediately face his indecision.

Daniel recognizes a mystical power within Izzy, likely from her brush with death, and he is inexplicably drawn to that power. The guilt he feels over his fascination with her and his lack of courage nearly push him to self-destruction, and it is only her love that pulls him back from the brink. She gives him the freedom to be himself, and he gives her the freedom to face her new limitations.

Just like the archaeological dig occurring on the farm, the two must uncover the treasures buried beneath layers of doubt and uncertainty, and just as those artifacts show a connection to the past, Daniel and Izzy must use their pasts to create a new future.

March 15, 2023
FIND ME in FLORENCE by Jule Selbo – Women’s Divorce Fiction, Romantic Fiction, Literary

Thirty-five-year-old Lyn Bennett explores the life of her late mother before she was married, in Jule Selbo’s romance novel, Find Me in Florence.

In 1966, Jenny, a Mud Angel, dropped everything to fly to Florence, Italy, in search of treasures buried in mud and water after the Arno flooded. She worked tirelessly alongside her fellow Mud Angels to rescue these priceless works of art and ancient books.

For all of Lyn’s life, she heard her mother’s stories until they became mundane and commonplace. But before Jenny passed away, she gave Lyn instructions on where to find her precious journal from her time in Italy. She left the cryptic message “Find me in Florence,” so when Lyn, an up-and-coming writer, has a chance to teach at a writer’s retreat in the city her mother loved, she jumps at the opportunity. Three years later, she still journeys there yearly for one month to explore Florence. With her latest book under her belt, Lyn decides to tell her mother’s story.

Lyn’s life shifts dramatically, and she soon searches for more than her mother’s history.

When she arrives in Florence, Lyn’s life seems on the upward swing. She put her writing back on track after the death of both of her parents, married a successful lawyer, and hopes to begin a family soon. However, all of that vanishes when Stan, her husband, surprises her not long after her seminar in Florence begins. Stan and Susie, Lyn’s best friend since junior high school, had an affair. The two followed Lyn to Florence to deliver the news in person, thinking her love of the city might lessen the blow of utter betrayal. Lyn’s true journey begins with this revelation. Suddenly, Lyn loses her hope as the people of Florence must have lost when her mother volunteered fifty years ago. But like the city, Lyn must endure.

Soon following the bombshell announcement, Lyn struggles between what she “should” do and what she “wants” to do.

She should accept this betrayal like an adult, negotiate reasonably with her cheating husband, forgive her BFF, and move past all of her pain. But surrounded by Florence, a city that called to her mother to leave her normal life, Lyn learns not to follow “the should” but to chase after “the want.” The vitality and passion of the Florentines give Lyn the strength she needs to “shed [her] skin.” Lyn rids herself of a life lived in fear of taking chances. Her mother’s own rash decision to become a Mud Angel and experience the adventure of a lifetime propels Lyn to stop accepting the expectations of everyone else. Perhaps Jenny meant for her daughter to learn this very lesson. As Lyn explores her fledgling confidence, she begins to realize all her mother gave up by returning to the US to fulfill her promise to marry Lyn’s father. She feels the life her mother could’ve lived if she had followed the “want” rather than the “should.”

This clash of responsibility and desire extends beyond Lyn’s story. Matteo, a man Lyn grows to care for over the course of the novel, wrestles with his wants as well. His responsibilities weigh on him, coming from a proud Italian family with a lineage and family home dating back four hundred years. They hope–expect–him to marry a woman closely connected to the family business. But after a chance meeting, he draws closer to the American with the broken heart. He should stay away, give her time to mourn the loss of her marriage and best friend, but he wants more from her. Though Matteo should pursue the woman his family has chosen, he wants the woman he shouldn’t, and like Lyn, he will have to decide whether to follow his heart or his head.

This novel celebrates Florence, its people, and its customs.

Any lover of Italy will enjoy the history included in Lyn’s story. With the detailed descriptions, readers come along on the journey to this beautiful city, eating at its most celebrated restaurants, and walking its ancient streets. Florence shows Lyn her innermost feelings and surrounds her with passion and acceptance. Embracing and appreciating Florence makes Jenny’s story alive, rather than just a dusty story from half a century ago.

Jule Selbo’s Find Me in Florence won 1st Place in the 2019 CIBA Chatelaine Book Awards for Romance and Romantic Fiction Novels.

February 4, 2022
NO PLACE LIKE ROME (A Lexi Carmichael Mystery Book 3) by Julie Moffett – Mystery, Satire Fiction, International Intrigue

Self-proclaimed first-class geek Lexi Carmichael might not handle small talk well, but she can hack nearly anything.

Lexi works for X-Corp Global Security Intelligence. When an enigmatic fellow hacker known as Slash hires X-Corp to catch a thief who has framed his uncle for laundering money from the Vatican Bank, Lexi jumps at the mystery. After all, who wouldn’t want to travel to Rome with a handsome possible spy? However, as soon as she begins her virtual snooping, Lexi learns that danger lurks under the surface. A man with an umbrella gun nearly kidnaps her; both she and Slash realize these criminals threaten more than his uncle’s reputation and the eighteen million euros.

A group of heavily encrypted files goes beyond even Lexi’s skills, and she calls in the help of some of the world’s greatest hackers to break the code. She leads them all deep into a historical mystery over 500 years in the making. But they aren’t the only people chasing answers, and the criminals will stop at nothing to capture their prize. Lexi needs more than computer skills to escape this time.

Feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty make Lexi more human than fiction, drawing readers to connect with her.

With her cringe-worthy social skills, Lexi doesn’t quite fit the mold of master detective. And yet, her hilarious, rambling talks with Slash make her endearing to him. Whether dealing with a jealous opera singer or a nosy Italian grandmother, Lexi makes one hysterical social misstep after another. Though clumsy and clueless when it comes to interacting with people, she proves herself otherwise smart and tough. Her hacking skills shine even to the computer-illiterate. She relies on a love of math and her quick thinking to save her friends and herself, all while standing up to gun-toting criminals. Lexi refuses to back down even when this mystery could cost her life.

Her budding, possible relationship with the delectable Slash adds just enough sizzling chemistry to satisfy romance readers.

As a secret agent for the NSA and a master hacker himself, Slash reeks of intrigue. He even refuses to tell Lexi his real name. The longer the two spend together, the more she struggles to resist his sensual temptation. Slash’s clear interest in Lexi presents some toe-curling scenes that walk the line between romantic and farcical.

Hidden clues in centuries-old paintings meet high-tech computer lingo in this third novel in the Lexi Carmichael series.

Engaging, well-developed characters fill this mystery story. The super-hacker twins, the trendy BFF, the sexy Italian mystery man, and his beefy buddy feel like old friends. The depth of the mystery will grip readers. From the Vatican to a secret crypt complete with booby-traps, No Place Like Rome boasts an adventure fit for a spy thriller.

No Place Like Rome by Julie Moffett won 1st Place in the 2014 CIBA M & M Awards for mystery and mayhem novels.

November 8, 2021