Critical Acclaim for Saving Rome

“Williams’ journalistic roots come showing through in her ability to shape a scene, layering elements to create a snapshot out of every paragraph, the focus sharp and the colours bright. Saving Rome is like a postcard from a friend with ‘Wish you were here’ scrawled on the back. Save the airfare and read this book instead.”
-- The Quill & Quire

"As her characters wrestle with a variety of conundrums, Williams treats them sympathetically but never simplistically. And she offers a few belly laughs too -- most notably in 'Let the Games Begin,' an oddly sexy, touching and wonderfully antic love story."
-- McGill News, Summer 2006

"In one word, Saving Rome is wonderful... with the perfect balance of interesting characters, punchy dialogue, page-turning drama, comedy and impeccable pacing... When I finished reading the collection, my heart ached the way it does every time it comes face-to-face with beauty."
-- Herizons Magazine, Summer 2006

"[A] tender-hearted and amusing first collection [with] fresh angles on themes of displacement, relationship ennui and disappointed expectations. Williams... has a clean, straightforward style, which is exactly what you'd expect from an accomplished journalist, and she reveals more intricate layers of plot at a graceful pace.... This is a great book to have on hand for summer travel, an assortment of prosaic delights with rich details about Italian culture.
-- NOW Magazine, Toronto, July 29, 2006

“The results are brilliant, as the various characters find themselves in an array of amusing – and sometimes moving – circumstances… At times witty and clever, sometimes slapstick and silly, the prevailing sense of humour that underscores each chapter is offset perfectly by a tempered sadness that is felt, but rarely spoken…. The writing is crisp and clean and flows smoothly in a graceful journalistic style. Saving Rome is filled with one woman’s vision, warmth and charm.”
-- The Halifax Daily News

“Unlike many other novels or short stories compiled by vigorously intelligent journalists - Megan is not boring. These stories… are fiercely honest takes on Roman life and of the adjustments North Americans must make to live there in relative peace… Megan has captured the feelings of inadequacy and the longing for home that many foreigners feel, without being insulting.”
-- Here Magazine

"The Rome-based Williams is a meticulous observer who mines import from the details of daily life. Each of these stories is a small gale in a passing cloud. Williams’ stories excavate all that’s unsaid about living in Rome. She doesn’t so much save the city — an obvious irony — as demonstrate the frailty of its protocols, giving each of her characters believable flaws and desires. This is a stunningly accomplished first collection.
-- The American Magazine, Rome

"Megan K Williams' first published fiction includes nine wonderful short stories... The reader ends up pondering these imponderables despite, or perhaps because of, Williams' truly fresh and funny style that avoids the kitsch or cute characterizations common to books in the foreigner abroad category... Saving Rome is well worth the read if you have not picked it up already."
-- The Roman Forum Monthly, October 2006

A McNally Robison Bookclub Recommendation

Toronto Public Library Recommended Reading

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The Woman Who Saved Rome — Fictionally Speaking
Profile in The American Magazine

More than your typical summer fare
Fastforward Calgary Weekly
 

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When in Rome …look for purpose
Review by Stephen Clare – The Halifax Daily News

Living abroad often works wonders for writers. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller are among the best-known to have renewed their perspectives and produced great works while enjoying — and enduring — lives of exile. Saving Rome is the first solo fiction effort for Canadian journalist Megan K.Williams; she co-authored On the Edge:Women Making Hockey History. Williams divides her time between Toronto and Rome and continues to contribute to The Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV, and National Public Radio in the United States. Her first job in Rome was as a journalist for Vatican Radio.

Divided into nine quirky and revealing stories, Saving Rome follows the lives of expatriate women looking for purpose in an aging city. Spellbound by the manic and mayhem of modern Rome, and stressed to shorten the distance between the Italian landscape and their native Canada, these travellers must quickly learn how to digest their new surroundings and adapt to the chaos and confusion of doing as the Romans do.

The results are brilliant, as the various characters find themselves in an array of amusing — and sometimes moving — circumstances. After following her partner to Italy, one woman develops a strange obsession with the owner of a local pet store. In another chapter, a distraught and shaken mother offers the one-fingered salute to a traffic officer who then follows her home. The story of the professional translator who comes to believe that literal translation of certain messages should not be attempted, is witty and wise, while the telling of a recluse who pushes her family away, but desperately needs to feel needed, is sombre and touching. The best anecdote of the bunch, however, is the civil servant who will not let her stack of unpaid parking tickets define her morality.

Saving Rome works well on several levels. Though each of the nine tales reads as a story in and of itself, there are common themes, thoughts and emotions that link the work together into a cohesive whole. By painting the interior beauty and passion of the characters against the lush exterior of the surroundings, Williams skillfully highlights the similarities between the women. As such, the reader is privy to the ties that bind. At times witty and clever, sometimes slapstick and silly, the prevailing sense of humour that underscores each chapter is offset perfectly by a tempered sadness that is felt, but rarely spoken. The lean descriptions of a fallen Rome are counterweighed by still-life portraits of individuals who unravel their illusions and ideas about themselves, their lives and the lives of those closest to them.

At times witty and clever, sometimes slapstick and silly, the prevailing sense of humour that underscores each chapter is offset perfectly by a tempered sadness that is felt, but rarely spoken.

Lastly, the writing is crisp and clean and flows smoothly in a graceful, journalistic style. As a Canadian ex-pat living and working in Rome herself, the author’s third-party narratives could easily read as first-party diaries. Thus, Saving Rome is filled with a sense of one woman’s vision, warmth and charm.

Saving Rome is best read while on vacation, planning a trip or when reflecting on past experiences afar. Readers will enjoy and relate to the unsettling sense of discomfort that comes with being a stranger in a strange land. Williams furthers that state by reminding us that it is the insignificant, everyday realities that fashion foreign feelings. It is also in these details that we soon learn to feel at home.

If this first effort is any indication of Williams’s talent and abilities, there is a good case for her to continue travelling and working overseas, with high hopes of more road tales to come. An excellent and enjoyable read for anyone interested in the wonders of living abroad in self-imposed exile.

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