This novel feels winding, just like the streets of Rome that the narrator wanders. She swerves through her own and Italy's history, in an atmospheric character-driven story.

Ok. I didn't dislike this book, but I didn't love it either. I had high hopes and was expecting so much more than what I got, sadly. Thank you, Netgalley for allowing me to review this title, I am still behind on my TBR. I wanted more of Vietri, less of the chase she eventually gave up on.

This book was really good, albeit a little sluggish in some parts. I can appreciate the story and the coming-of-age type of self-discovery time period we all go through. I feel like this would really appeal to people who enjoy Sally Rooney or others along that line.

2.5, rounded up after a coin flip. The premise of this first novel sounded intriguing in its positive NYTimes review: Gabriele, a 20-something woman working in an academic bookstore in Berkeley, flies to Rome to track down Giordano Vietri, a vanished elderly mail-order client with whom she's become randomly fascinated. Her search gives a certain measure of meaning and structure to an otherwise aimless millennial life of backpacking to and from random hostels on random continents, and Gabriele reconstructs the history of her Rome-born schizophrenic mother's family.

In Rome, Gabriele becomes a vessel for older Italians' traumatic life stories, apparent distractions from the quest that actually (wait for it) might become the real story. DeRobertis-Theye attempts to process the darkest moments of 20th-century Italian history-- Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, the Fascist persecution of Jews and leftists, the political terrorism of the Years of Lead-- attempting a Sebaldian register of high seriousness that exceeds her skills as a writer on the sentence-to-sentence level.

As a protagonist and first-person narrator, Gabriele is a near-total emotional blank, but it's difficult to distinguish her flat affect from the general flatness (and occasional precious overreach) of the novel's prose. For such a short novel, this was slow going. And since the novel's mid-section was languorously paced, and the exposition was rushed without giving the reader time to digest major pieces of information, the narrative reweaving of its denouement felt unsatisfying.

Thanks to Netgalley and Harper for providing me with a free ARC of The Vietri Project in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.<

I tried to like this more than I did. I found it dry and did not like the narrator. The writing style also didn't work for me. Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I’m judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“I learned that there is a plant whose leaves when chewed, can soothe heart palpitations, and this plant produces a tiny red flower in the shape of a heart; that in shamanistic seances in Siberia infertile women were encouraged to mimic the sounds of a reindeer calf; that the sage who wrote the Ramayana was instructed to chant the word for death, mara, over and over, and after decades of saying MaraMaraMara realized he was intoning the name of god, Rama, Rama, Rama.”

I absolutely adored The Vietri Project by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye. It's a novel that stays with you and reading it is like drinking a really nice glass of wine. It is a coming of age story set in Rome and you just love following along. It's a serious read in a beautiful setting and I was delighted to have found this book (I was reminded of it on my shelf by a blurb in The New Yorker) Great book! Thank you!

The Vietri Project by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye is a novel chronicling the life of Gabriele, a woman who drops everything and leaves her bookstore job to learn more about a customer, Vietri, who lives in Rome. Gabriele becomes intrigued by the life Vietri as he spends thousands of dollars over several years on books with a wide range of topics covered across the books that don't make sense to her. When she arrives in Rome, she quickly reaches a dead end on her search for Vietri and tries to follow the limited pieces of information and the resources of her cousin to try and learn more about Vietri. As her search for Vietri extends beyond what she expected, she learns more about herself and her familial ties in the process.

I found the premise of this book so intriguing and was excited when I received this ARC. I expected an adventurous novel filled with secrets and reveals, but this ended up being a much quieter book than I thought. Sadly, I think that may be part of the reason this book did not work for me. I enjoyed the writing and loved how the writer developed the sense of place so well that I could imagine myself walking the same streets as Gabriele. However I think this book lacked tension and much of the reveals felt anti-climatic or brushed over that it was hard to feel connected to Gabriele and the author characters. I also felt like although Gabriele seemed to grow a bit, there was something missing in her development and why that development occurred. It was also hard to see how much Gabriele self-destructed and I didn't really understand why she was so motivated to pursue Vietri's identity to the point of committing crimes. I also didn't like that there was no dialogue and instead it was revealed through Gabriele's summaries. Although this did not work for me I still would like to see future work from this author. I would recommend this book for those that like quiet novels with an interior focus!

Many thanks to the publisher Harper and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

After the first couple of chapters, I was not enjoying the book. I thought it was going to be one thing but very soon it became something else. I started to question it “so what?” “What is the purpose of this story?” but even though I was asking those questions and felt frustrated I would still pause and reflect on the words. There was always a quote to highlight and markdown, a reason to set the book down and spiral into reflection. It was easy to read and I found that I start to enjoy reading it. It isn’t a book for entertainment but thoughtful consumption. It is a novel that inspires reflection and makes you think about life and what it is and what it should be. I felt deep connections with Gabriele, while also feeling lots of frustration toward her. She is a complex character who highlights the complexity in humanity and ourselves.
DeRobertis-Theye writes a subtly powerful novel about humanity and identity. She weaves a tale that focuses on community and isolation. It is about the past and present and the future of a country, of a family, of a man. The novel is about a quest that Gabriele begins, and she takes us on her quest while encouraging us to go on our quest. A beautifully written novel that will make you contemplate life.

*I received a free copy of this book in return for an honest review.*

Gabriele’s life has been on hold up until now. Sure, she’s got a college degree, a steady boyfriend, and had a decent (if low-paying) job at a bookstore. But when that steady boyfriend suddenly proposes marriage at the beginning of The Vietri Project, by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye, something becomes unmoored in Gabriele. She dumps the boyfriend and follows a wild hair to Rome. This novel is a slow journey not just to Rome but also to Gabriele finally realizing who she wants to be.

Years ago, right about when she turned twenty-five, Gabriele’s mother developed schizophrenia. It takes her some time to figure it out, but Gabriele finally recognizes that she’s been avoiding big commitments until she hits her own twenty-fifth birthday. The surprise marriage proposal that Gabriele doesn’t want to accept sends her out of the apartment she was sharing with her boyfriend and into a strange project: to find the Signor Vietri of Rome who ordered hundreds of strange, obscure books from the shop where she used to work. All Gabriele can remember is his address. She’s never directly corresponded with Signor Vietri, let alone talked to him over the phone. But she just has to know what Vietri wanted with all those books.

The descriptions of Vietri’s reading list hooked me on The Vietri Project. So it was surprising to learn—after the first chapter or so—that this novel was not about a book mystery. Instead, we see Gabriele arrive in Rome, fail to find Signor Vietri, and instead end up reconnecting with her mother’s family and learning to live beyond age twenty-five. I was a little stunned by this literary bait-and-switch. I was a little irked. (I really wanted to know what Vietri was up to with all those books of the dead and spiritualist books.) Once I let got of my expectations and let Gabriele follow her inclinations, I started to enjoy her quirky journey.

The Vietri Project is unlike most journey-of-discovery stories I’ve ever read. The plot sneaks up on you, because I’m fairly sure that Gabriele didn’t know what she was doing when she climbed on a plane for Italy. Because I had no clue what Gabriele was going to do next, I felt myself slowing down and looking around the scenery like the protagonist was doing. Reading The Vietri Project was almost like going on a bookish vacation myself.

"I had a feeling of grasping that if I could only sift together all of the stories I had heart, if I could understand these stories as a part of one story, maybe, maybe I would get close. I wondered If I was trying to save myself, and I wondered if it would work." The Vietri Project begs the question of what makes your story, yours? Is it one you can write yourself or is it one that's made up of all the other layers of your life and stories of those in your orbit?

What begins as a journey to find a mysterious scholar that ordered thousands of books by mail from the Berkley bookstore where she worked, Gabriele heads to Rome, the home of her mother and her maternal family, and ends up trying to find her own story. Lost in her late twenties, I found Gabriele's character to be incredibly relatable as she searched for some sort of meaning in her life, while resisting building any connections in her life deeply, out of fear of being 'tied down.' Though Gabriele's search is ostensibly for the mysterious Vietri, she ends up digging into both the city of Rome's many layers, and those of her family's. Fearful of eventually succumbing to mental illness like her mother, it isn't until she sees her massive Italian family as individuals that she begins to understand that she too can still be part of her family and be vastly different from what she believed she was predestined to become.

Truthfully, I was going to begin to read a different book, but when I tried to open it, my Kindle opened this book instead. Since I'm not one to argue with fate, I began reading.

The story opens in Berkeley, California, where Gabriele is working at a bookstore. Because she is the newest person there, she is assigned to fill these large, cumbersome book orders that are ordered by a man named Vietri. Through the years Gabriele continues filling Vietri's eclectic orders, which arrive by typewritten letter every few months. When Gabriele finally leaves the bookstore and begins traveling, she find herself in Rome--the city where she sent all of Vietri's books. Coincidentally, Gabriele herself has dual citizenship and all of her mother's family still lives in Rome. Growing up, she visited every summer. Back now, for the first time she was a pre-teen, Gabriele sets out to find Vietri, a journey that leads her back to her family and makes her question who she is herself.

The writing in this book is absolutely beautiful and the depictions of Rome and it's citizens is like taking a literary vacation. I learned so much about Italy and the country's role in WWWII--things I had never been curious about before but now having read this, I'm immensely curious. And those are the things a good book does; they transport you and teach you and make you think about things you never would have though about otherwise. I truly enjoyed this novel about coming of age and starting down the path to discover who you are. Definitely recommend.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. I'll be posting my review on Goodreads and Amazon

I wanted to love this book, but it felt so slow and redundant. The premise of the story was fantastic, but I had a really hard time connecting to the characters. The story was a great thought, but just did not feel like it was executed well. I had to keep starting the book over again. In the end, I don’t think I’d purchase this again or but it for others.

One of the best novels I've read in months. I truly enjoyed this book, largely because of the voice. The book is in the first person and involves a lot of "telling," which can be hit or miss in novels, but in my opinion, works brilliantly in this book. The story handles so many things at once: feeling lost in your twenties, dysfunctional families, mental health, language barriers, and even (most interestingly to me) intergenerational trauma. The book is a pure delight and I can't recommend it enough.

There is something about this book that makes it a shade shy of great; it lacks something to make it truly memorable. I think the framing device - the mystery of Vietri, which actually pulled me to this book in the first place - is to blame here. The meandering way the narrator deals with Vietri seemed to me to be like the run-on sentences that dominate this book: a stylistic choice, and one that doesn't always work. There are points when it feels logical, and then other points - particularly near the end, when she has her self-actualization moment - that it becomes the kind of thinly veiled metaphor you'd normally associate with a Hallmark movie or Carrie Bradshaw voiceover. And that's a shame because the real meat of the story - the narrator reconnecting with her family - felt so much more organic and interesting and should have been much more in focus than it was.

I do believe other readers will find something to enjoy here, but I also believe that, for me, this book could've been stronger than it was.