The Sun and Other Stars

November 25, 2013
What do you do if everyone in your little town is obsessed with soccer, and you couldn’t care less? If all the guys your age are out chasing girls, and you’re hopelessly socially awkward? And if those are just the irritations atop the real injuries—your soccer-star twin brother died in a car crash, your mother killed herself afterward, and you and your father work together in the family butcher shop but never talk? The torments to which Pasulka subjects Etto, the 22-year-old protagonist of her second novel (after A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True), occur in San Benedetto, a beautiful tourist town on the Italian Riviera; it’s close-knit but suffocating, and Etto wants to leave, but is afraid to. And then a stranger comes to town, his father’s favorite soccer player, scandal-clouded Ukrainian Yuri Fil, whose entourage includes his equally soccer-mad and -skilled sister, Zhuki. The resulting complications could easily have been cloyingly “heartwarming,” but Pasulka avoids cliché with some lovely writing (Etto, falling for Zhuki, decides her name sounds like “the waves foaming up on the beach in the winter”), well-placed low humor, and specificity of place. Readers will be crossing their fingers for Etto to find some well-deserved happiness. Agent: Wendy Sherman, Wendy Sherman Associates.

December 1, 2013

At last, a winsome literary treat for today's soccer moms. What better way to pass the time between car pools than reading about a small town on the Italian Riviera, where Italian soccer, known as calcio, is a way of life? Everyone in San Benedetto is obsessed, except 22-year-old Etto, who's still grieving the loss of both his mother and his brother, who had been an up-and-coming calcio star. Slogging day by day in his father's butcher shop, occasionally venturing out to nightclubs with his moronic friends ("deficiente"), Etto is bitter, grouchy, and full of despair. Then one day Ukrainian soccer phenom Yuri Fil arrives in San Benedetto with his entourage, fleeing the paparazzi and a scandal. Yuri and his deeply protective sister Zhuki draw Etto into a pickup game of calcio that morphs into something much more--a chance at love and hope for the future. VERDICT This simple love story by the Pen/Hemingway Award-winning author of A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True is heavy on soccer--and Italian profanity, which, since it's in Italian, seems cute and not offensive. This charming story will appeal to fans of Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins. [See Prepub Alert, 8/12/13.]--Christine Perkins, Whatcom County Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

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