Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #248508 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Synopsis
A gang of street urchins and an American soldier fight to liberate the city of Naples from the German army Naples, late September, 1943. The war in Europe is almost won. Italy is leaderless; Mussolini already arrested by anti-fascists. The city has been evacuated, but the German army is moving towards Naples to finish the job. Their chilling instructions are: if the city can't belong to Hitler, it will belong to no one. No one but the children. Orphaned or hidden by parents, abandoned or lost, some as young as ten years old, the children of Naples resist. Aided by a lone Allied soldier, cut off from his regiment, and armed with just a handful of guns, unexploded bombs and their own ingenuity, the street boys are determined to take on the advancing enemy and save the city - or die trying.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating story
This book was incredibly difficult to put down. I knew it was a work of fiction, but the fact that it was based on real events made it all seem more real to me and even though I wanted all the children to survive, I knew that they wouldn't.

The story is fast paced and Lorenzo Carcaterra's language makes the war torn city of Naples come alive inside the reader's mind. Most characters in the book seem very real. They all have their faults and fears, but still manage a heroic feat.

The reason I'm giving it 4 stars rather than 5 is the language issue. In Mr Carcaterra's world all these young street kids in 1940's Naples all of a sudden speak fluent English and are also able to understand what German soldiers are saying to each other. The German soldiers speak broken Italian, but all seem to speak English. This is just taking fiction a bit too far. It wouldn't have done the story any harm to have the characters of various nationalities have problems understanding each other.

Finally, if you have any knowledge of Italian you need to temporarily forget it when you read this book. I wish the editors had taken time to have the Italian language bits (a few sentences here and there) corrected. Even allowing for the Neapolitan dialect being different from Italian, it's painful to read if you speak Italian and it wouldn't have taken long to have it corrected. It almost made me rate the book as a 3, but then I realised that most people who read it won't notice the difference.

Great book
Set in the city of Naples in the second world war 'Street boys' follows a group of orphaned street children who resist against a Nazi panza division sent to destroy their city.

A MUST READ. This was the second Carceterra book ive read and i wasn't disapointed. Carceterra uses a structure to the book wich aborbs you and makes it very difficult to put down. the book also bleeds emotion and is not for the faint hearted.

Take this one and turn it into another movie, Hollywood.
This novel has the potential for being an entertaining Hollywood movie. It's written like a movie script, broken up into many short scenes, fast, compelling, all in all entertaining.

Unfortunately, however, the novel is littered with an exasperating quantity of cliches on Southern Italy and Naples and an equally high amount of Italian phrases or alleged Neapolitan sayings, which are more often than not either misspelled or plain wrong or both. Admittedly, this would only annoy an Italian or a non-Italian who is familiar with the South of Italy. Having said that, the lack of Italian knowledge (or poor editing) took a lot away from the authenticity of the story which really hangs only on the author's topographical knowledge of Naples.

A good pass time if your not Italian.