Any story with a precocious child protagonist starts with minus one star in my assessment, and if the child is an orphan, it's minus another. Calvino's first novel — about a precocious, wisecracking orphan finding his way among anti-fascist partisans in wartime Italy while grappling with the twin mysteries of politics and women — struggles to overcome this handicap. It's uneven, the hectic early pace of Pin's urban adventures slowing dramatically once he's ensconced in the woods with his adoptive family of rough and ready guerillas. And the ending (as endings of orphan tales tend to be) is schmaltzy to a Dickensian degree. But the book goes some way to conveying the dissociative effects of war on childhood, it isn't dull or worthy, and I've certainly encountered more irritating precocious child protagonists than little, big-mouthed Pin.