✨ Another glowing milestone for A LIFE ALMOST PERFECT by Patrizia Ciava! ✨
Kirkus Reviews calls it “an engaging and surprising dual-narrative novel about enduring love” and awards their coveted verdict: GET IT ✅
A Kirkus review is one of the most prestigious recognitions in publishing—trusted by booksellers, librarians, educators, and publishers worldwide. It’s a prestigious achievement and a significant endorsement for an author.
In Ciava’s novel, the parallel stories of a woman in crisis and a successful musician converge.
An unnamed woman with an 18-month-old son is striving to hold onto hope, faithfully visiting the hospital bedside of her husband, Matteo, who’s been in a coma for some time and shows no signs of coming out of it. Everyone in her life, including the doctors; her best friend, Diana; and, most explicitly, her mother-in-law Renata, are cautiously counseling her to acknowledge that Matteo is never going to regain consciousness. Matteo patiently guided the narrator through her trauma from a previous relationship with the violent Ivano (who’s now in prison), and her hope in his recovery is correspondingly unshakable.
In the book’s other major storyline, an unnamed frontman and songwriter for a popular band is shepherding his group to another international hit album; he balances his career with his relationship with his wife, Lena, and his son, about whom he cares deeply. Ciava writes all of this in a clear, passionate, well-paced manner, and it succeeds despite some occasionally overwrought prose (“The memory of the chaotic energy that once filled our home tightens around my heart”). The separate viewpoints are sharply and effectively differentiated in alternating chapters, and the narratives are each populated with well-drawn secondary players.
One rhetorical gimmick—a refusal to name the main characters narrating each of the story’s main threads—is initially tiresome, particularly when secondary characters seem to go out of their way to avoid saying their names. However, it’s all part of a skillful narrative braiding that comes into its own in the pleasingly subversive concluding section.
The novel’s deeper themes, regarding perseverance in the face of loss and pain, surface in convincing moments of reflection by the two main narrators: “Life has pushed us to a breaking point,” Matteo’s wife thinks at one point. “All we can do is endure and learn how to cope.”
An engaging and surprising dual-narrative novel about enduring love.
Patrizia Ciava 
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