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The Family © 2001 by The Estate of Mario Puzo and Carol Gino Book dedicated to Bert Fields "Who snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and who could be the greatest consiglieri of them all" BUY THIS BOOK

Some Reviews of

The Family

From Booklist

When Mario Puzo died in 1999, he had spent 15 years or so, on and off, working on this novel about the Borgias: Rodrigo, who became Pope Alexander VI, and his famously villainous offspring, Cesare and Lucrezia. Puzo put a lot of work into the story, and it shows: this posthumously published tale is one of his most satisfying novels in a long, long time, far superior to most of his recent work. The saga is lush, full of detail, with characters who manage to be larger than life while seeming entirely realistic. The dialogue is slightly ornamented but never clumsy, and the plot is appropriately epic in scope, mixing fact and fiction seamlessly. Families, of course, were Puzo's signature theme, and in the fifteenth-century Vatican he finds a family as complex and multitextured as the Corleones. The book was completed by Puzo's companion, novelist Carol Gino, but its tone is pure Puzo, start to finish. A thoroughly entertaining posthumous present from one of the masters of popular fiction.

From Entertainment Weekly (10/5/01)

Begun by the late Godfather scribe and finished by companion Gino, this piece of titillation follows Pope Alexander VI and his bastard children as they scandalize the Catholic church in Renaissance Italy. The result reads like a lurid tour of mischief and malice: To your left, incestuous pregnancy; to your right, torture, leeches, and fratricide! Over here, serving little point, is Machiavelli.... Now let's keep moving, people. You don't want to miss our warrior-dominatrix -- she loves coerced sex! Nearly plot-free and always lascivious, The Family is, it must be admited, bizarrely amusing. --Gillian Flynn

 

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