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A review by katyl
Short Stories in Italian for Beginners by Olly Richards
3.0
I've given this book of short stories 3 stars because the writing is so well pitched at the high beginner to low-intermediate learner of Italian, as promised on the back cover. The language content has been skilfully chosen, & is appropriately reinforced throughout the book. I was, therefore, very pleased to be able to understand a great deal of the vocabulary, to be able to understand more or less all of the detail of the narratives, & to feel that I was simultaneously making progress with the language.
However, there were very odd omissions from the glossary, & I had frequently to refer to an Italian dictionary to remedy this deficit. Additionally, vocabulary was given in the vocab sections following the individual chapters which definitely belongs to a beginner-beginner level, eg padre, cliente, palazzo. There were also several typos which let the text down.
The biggest failing, however, was the nature of the stories which, as other reviewers have said, are bizarre. Time-slip stories, with the honourable exception of charming children's stories such as Tom's Midnight Garden & A Traveller in Time, are rarely interesting &, as here, are hard to pull off. The sci-fi was deeply odd, & even the one 'credible' story in the sense of 'it could have happened' was rather unpleasant, involving as it did an elaborate, prolonged, & nasty 'joke' as a birthday surprise. It is a pity that the stories fell down on these points as the writer clearly has a gift for scaffolding language learning, & I was very satisfied with the language learning element.
However, there were very odd omissions from the glossary, & I had frequently to refer to an Italian dictionary to remedy this deficit. Additionally, vocabulary was given in the vocab sections following the individual chapters which definitely belongs to a beginner-beginner level, eg padre, cliente, palazzo. There were also several typos which let the text down.
The biggest failing, however, was the nature of the stories which, as other reviewers have said, are bizarre. Time-slip stories, with the honourable exception of charming children's stories such as Tom's Midnight Garden & A Traveller in Time, are rarely interesting &, as here, are hard to pull off. The sci-fi was deeply odd, & even the one 'credible' story in the sense of 'it could have happened' was rather unpleasant, involving as it did an elaborate, prolonged, & nasty 'joke' as a birthday surprise. It is a pity that the stories fell down on these points as the writer clearly has a gift for scaffolding language learning, & I was very satisfied with the language learning element.