SOURCE: "A Puppet-Show in the Great Bitch," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4596, May 31, 1991, p. 19.

In the following favorable review of Pinocchio in Venice, Sage praises the novel's humor, brilliance, and intensity.

In 1985 Cardinal Biffi, the Archbishop of Bologna, wrote a theological commentary on Pinocchio, showing how the story of the puppet whose nose grows every time he tells a lie is a most satisfactory allegory of original sin. Pinocchio, created by a carpenter-father, painfully weaned away from Toyland at the last, via the mediation of the mysterious blue-haired fairy, and turned into a flesh-and-blood human, is a brand plucked from a burning, a toy-boy who proves to have a soul after all. Robert Coover, celebrating the centenary of the death of Pinocchio's author Carlo Lorenzini (who was, even the good Cardinal admitted, a bit of an agnostic), has produced [Pinocchio in Venice] a hilariously phallic riposte, a...