Steve Cunningham's Reviews > The Optician of Lampedusa

I feel a little bit bad for giving this book such a low rating. It is undoubtedly a very worthy story richly deserving of telling, yet for such a short book I often found myself slogging through it simply to get to the end. For me, a good short book can be read in 2-3 sittings (or fewer), yet this took me about a dozen. Despite the merits of the story, I found the prose rather turgid and stilted; the characters loosely drawn rather than fully fleshed out; and often, for a story that is fundamentally one of human emotions, an emotional chasm between the reader and the events and experiences being described.