Firenze
By Otis West

This is so short and so propulsive that I read it in one sitting. At first I worried I wasn't going to get along with it because the narrative voice is so stroppy and immature, that of an American male Gen Xer on his semester abroad in the late 1980s. He is every white American lad you could ever meet at that time, who finds himself on a trip to Florence, the most amazing place for a study abroad gig, yet can only summons derision for everything around him, the chicks, the assholes, the dorks, the retards (YES, I was about to DNF but realised the self awareness just in time, calmed down, kept my hair on and continued), the stupid locals who couldn't understand his non Italian, the Eurotrash who weren't American enough, the clothing style, the food (what???), the closing time of shops, the bathroom fixtures, the cobbles that hobbled his skateboarding intentions. Everything is a pain in the ass when you cannot imagine anything outside your own sphere of knowledge.

But once I cooled my jets over the liberal peppering of the R word throughout the book, I found this really quite funny. It's like being love bombed by references to a time and place that is both familiar and lost.

Kevin starts out as someone I would have maintained a polite distance from at that age, but by the end, I just wanted to wrap him up and protect him from himself.

This is such a layered little novel that contains much more than you'd think at first glance. It speaks of a time when the world was less homogenised, and a different country might as well have been a different planet.

Highly recommend.

Publication date: 15th September 2025
Thanks to #Netgalley and #VictoryEditing for providing an ARC for review purposes

Firenze by Otis West captures a young man living abroad and how he can't seem to fully appreciate the experience at the time. Fresh, raw and relatable.