Amazon Zapinette Baguette and Tagliatelle Zapinette Baguette and Tagliatelle Category:  Humor Publisher: l'Aleph ISBN-10:  9187751240 Type: Fiction Pages: 332 Copyright: March 2014 ISBN-13: 9789187751240 Zapinette lives with her mother, a staunch ‘felinist’who owns a beauty parlor in Paris, as well as with Firmin, the latter’s boyfriend. The girl however feels much closer to her ‘Unky Berky’, in spite of the fact that he is “such a weirdo at times and can get on her bloomin nerves”. Through Firmin, ‘the vermin’, she learns that her beloved uncle is a ‘homey setchual’. They will travel to Italy together and the trip promises to be quite bumpy.  Zapinette lives with her mother, a staunch ‘felinist’who owns a beauty parlor in Paris, as well as with Firmin, the latter’s boyfriend. The girl however feels much closer to her ‘Unky Berky’, in spite of the fact that he is “such a weirdo at times and can get on her bloomin nerves”. Through Firmin, ‘the vermin’, she learns that her beloved uncle is a ‘homey setchual’. They will travel to Italy together and the trip promises to be quite bumpy.     Excerpt “One evening - you can call that a surprise! - Unky Berky took me to the theater. Of course, I started to sulk, coz I believe plays are the most boring entertainment ever invented, especially with them actors who think they have to scream their heads off to be heard and flail their hands likes baboons in search of a banana, and who furthermore almost always wear dusty old-fashioned clothes, bowing a hundred times at the end like they were geishas.",

World Literature Today (USA)
“... This book is a great ramble, rather like a chapterless Montaigne popping from one subject to the next, drawing connections no one else would ever have thought of, but with Groucho Marx, say, passing on hints over the writer’s shoulder as to how to go about it. We readers chuckle along and even burst out laughing as we advance through this hilarious book, but we gather, we too willy-nilly, the serious messages underlying the frolicking bounce and jocular mode of the writing.”
Leslie Schenk, in World Literature Today (USA)



Small Press Review
“ ... The narrator of Albert Russo’s new novel, Zapinette, is a little girl of our time, very knowledgeable about the outside world, but also enormously ignorant of the language commonly used about it, and, as a result, very funny. Her phonetic transcriptions of what she hears and her malapropisms make of her a powerfully distorting lens but, strangely enough, also a reliable witness. Albert Russo has thankfully spared us all the clichés of the genre, and what we read in his novel is a genuine portrait of a genuine child.”
Jean-Luc Breton, in Small Press Review (USA)


The Literary Review
Zapinette lives with her mother, a staunch ‘felinist’who owns a beauty parlor in Paris, as well as with Firmin, the latter’s boyfriend. The girl however feels much closer to her ‘Unky Berky’, in spite of the fact that he is “such a weirdo at times and can get on her bloomin nerves”. Through Firmin, ‘the vermin’, she learns that her beloved uncle is a ‘homey setchual’. They will travel to Italy together and the trip promises to be quite bumpy.

“... Be warned, Zapinette's gems of insouciant wit tend to become infectious. This wise-child's deceptively worldly innocence takes the entire gamut of human endeavor in its compass. Hardly anyone or anything escapes unscathed.  Michael Jackson,Vittorio de Sica, Freddy Mercury, Mao Zedong, Bill and Hill, the Pope, Fidel Castro, and even Jesus of Nazareth all come under Zapinette's delightfully zany fire as she "zaps" from topic to topic in an irrepressible flux. As the century of the double zeros dawns, we have seen the future and the future is sham. As a healthy dose of counter-sham, Zapinette Video should be on every brain-functional person's reading list.”
THE  LITERARY  REVIEW