Customer Reviews

An Amazing Story

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I found An Amazing Love Story delightful to read and I'm not easy to please. This is the tale of a beautiful teenage Brazilian girl who lives with her mother, Juanita, and Jack, her satyr-like stepdad. Her father died when she was a baby. The author is astute enough to make the mother a loving, but weak woman and this is what is psychologically required for incest to get started. At first, Jack is the loving, perfect father to the girl, but Juanita gets pregnant with twins and the hell begins. Jack shows his true colors and begins to subtly court his stepdaughter while making heavy sexual demands on his wife.

With the lack of common sense so common to teens, Delores tries to save her mother by coming on to Jack who is all too happy to take advantage of her. The mother is furious and turns against Delores and the girl leaves, winds up in Australia. With little education and a taste for the high life, she becomes a call girl, a high class prostitute. This part of the novel is interesting because it is like nothing else I've read about the life.

Then Delores meets Thomas, a famous photographer and they are drawn, but each is afraid of love. The scenes of the slow growth of their love and their passion are some of the best I've ever read. And the end section deals heavily with the Brazilian rainforest and the fight to save it. Again, it is unique, well delineated. Thomas and Delores are lovers of note and I will long remember them.

The one thing that mars the book is the fact that Mr. Gabbi is Italian and learned English at an early age, but didn't continue to use it. There are, therefore, errors in syntax and grammar, but I didn't find them glaring, nor did they stop my enjoyment of the story. A really good editing job would have prevented this. I've read books from reputable publishers with almost as many, or as many, errors and their books sell like hotcakes.

Kudos to Mr. Gabbi for writing me a worthwhile story that I hugely enoyed.

Francine Craft
Designed For Passion - on sale now

Congratulations, Carlo Gabbi, with your book, that captivates the reader's attention from just the first lines!
I find it very interesting (the plot itself and how it is presented) and informative (there is so much information about Brazilian life and carnivals). I have learned so much about the depicted places, Brazil and Sydney, that I became interested in visiting both of them now, to see all that for myself!
I can definitely say that Carlo Gabbi is a wonderful story-teller: the reader is looking forward to know what will be on the next page and in the next coming episode; it is difficult to close the book!
To conclude I would like to say: "An Amazing Story" is really an amazing book! Enjoyable and still serious book; I recommend it to readers.
Irena Prokofyeva

After reading the book, An Amazing Story, by Carlo Gabbi, I find myself mostly disappointed. That is not to say that the book did not have its merits.
To summarize, the book is a work of fiction, based in part on actual memoirs. It begins with Bill relating how he came about receiving the scrapbooks and diaries from his niece, Dolores. The rest of the story accounts Dolores through a good portion of her life and the trials she endured. Beginning in her native Brazil, to California where her mother moved the family and remarried, then Australia, it relays the sexual molestation by her step-father, to her life as a high-class prostitute, and on to her chance meeting with Thomas- a man she finds herself falling in love with.
Let me start out by saying this book is in need of some serious editing. Normally, I do not focus on these things too greatly, but in this case it ruined the book for me as it was overwhelmingly distracting. The book went from first person point of view, to third person, and then back again. It was done, not in a way to spin the story between the characters or add narrative, but as an error. It also jumped from past tense to present tense often. I found words that needed to be capitalized, or that were and shouldn't have been. There were several commas needed, or were inappropriately placed. There were many grammatical errors such as: an/a, there/their, has/had, etc. The grammar and spelling needed to be checked as well, as there were misspellings, partial words, and some words made plural that should not have been. The book also got off to a very slow start. It wasn't until the third chapter that I found myself interested in reading. There were a few dead spots where I lost interest. I feel this book should be listed or targeted as a fictional memoir, instead of romantic fiction, and stick to the first person to keep the significance.
After saying that, the trials that Dolores endured were both heart-breaking and overwhelming. I found her very relatable. The author has an extensive vocabulary, which allowed the reader to become more engaged in the storyline. Readers can take from this book a greater knowledge of other cultures through America, Brazil, and Australia. With some tweaking, editing, and a change of genre, this book could do well.


Kelly Moran,
Author and Reviewer