Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter is a novel that starts in a very small village on the coast of Italy in the early 1960’s and takes the reader to modern day Hollywood and back.

At the heart of the novel is the love story between Pascuale and Dee.Walter writes from many different perspectives in many different formats. Sometimes this was fascinating and worked well with the overall story, and at other times I found it distracting, and just wanted to get back to Pascuale and Dee.

There’s a little Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, and Donner Party thrown in for good measure. An original and worthwhile read.