Customer Reviews

Lucky Leonardo

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read all the rave reviews about this book and was very excited at the prospect of a great weekend read. Instead, I thought it was a book that tried way too hard to be off beat and funny. There were so very many characters, many of them sketchy at best, and the organization of events was very jumpy. I was not at all pleased to have wasted my 11.95 on this one.

I never read whacky humor. But after speaking with the author on a legal question, I was curious. It took me a while to get into the story because of the numerous characters, and the jumps from scene to unrelated scene.

However, as I adjusted to his slapstick humor and the true-to-life misfortunes, I admired his clever use of words and became intrigued with how he would solve the dilemmas. I have experienced the capriciousness of legal machinations and thus enjoyed the ironic twists and turns of fate as Leonardo's reasonable expectations so often turned into nightmares. You had to love the exposure of how some lawyers think and act as only an insider can reveal. By Jeanine Collins Malarsky - author of BLACK RASPBERRIES and UNWORTHY.

My only regret is that this extremely entertaining novel had to end. Canter skillfully weaves memorable and honest characters into a matrix of compelling events, which flow across intersecting time lines. If you have been around long enough to, despite your best efforts, be swept up in circumstances beyond your control, this engaging book will shed a bright light on how to keep smiling through it all. It is difficult to put this book down, with its funhouse mirror reflection on how we deal with the turmoil in our lives. If you are lucky enough, you will read this book and learn how to use a sense of humor through it all.

As if Nabokov had written Desperate Housewives and changed the setting to the Boston burbs, which are colder, brainier, and more clever.

A supersonically fast and fun read that will transport you for X minutes (depending on your habits) to Canter's wonderfully clever, picaresque, and effervescent world of law firms, hi-tech, middle-aged sexual longing, casinos, and an ambient world where dazzling observation takes the place of gravity.
......a GREAT place to transport yourself to on a crowded airplane, lousy family event, or if you need great company on a Stairmaster.

This is a book with a style and sense of humor that are both original. The protagonist, a divorced pyschiatrist, starts out as a successful, golf-addicted man-in-demand, but quickly becomes entangled in an insider trading scandal during which he falls from grace and lands on a young Starbucks attendant, named Chrissy. But my words are insufficient. It is how Author Canter's words sing to you to about your own feelings and make you laugh out loud, even as the protagonist falls further and further from where we first found him and then inexplicably recovers the had of his wife. At the end of the book you will only want to know this: when is the next book coming?

Okay, this is a very funny book-a Keystone Kops caper by a former Harvard Lampooner that joyfully leaps from one set of hijinks to the next. But, as they say on late-night TV, there's more: Attorney Canter provides a rich bag of tricks Author Canter and the tale is anchored in all kinds of legal madness. Leonardo Cook is a good soul-a warmly drawn character who is every bit as endearing as Michael Malone's Raleigh Whittier Hayes or John Kennedy's Ignatius J. Reilly-forever just a banana peel away from catastrophe. His tale is compelling and Lucky Leonardo is a more than just a bundle of laughs: It's a page-turner that grabbed me from the get-go right through to the stunning resolution.