SOURCE: “Foreigners in the Family,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 24, 1996, p. 6.

In the following review, Merrill offers a positive assessment of An Italian Education.

In his first book of nonfiction, Italian Neighbors, the British novelist Tim Parks chronicled his initiation into the Veneto, exploring the lives of a people less celebrated in literature than Tuscans—and no less eccentric. A signal event for this expatriate was the birth of his first child, and in An Italian Education, the delightful sequel to Italian Neighbors, Parks uses his children's upbringing as a way to “understand how it happens that an Italian becomes an Italian, how it turns out (as years later now it has turned out) that my own children are foreigners.”

An Italian Education opens during summer vacation along the Adriatic Sea, when Parks and Rita, his Italian-born wife, learn they have set out on what her...