GOSH, ZAPINETTE!

Zapinette lives with her mother, a staunch ‘felinist’who owns a beauty parlor in Paris, as well as with Firmin, the latter’s boyfriend. The girl however feels much closer to her ‘Unky Berky’, in spite of the fact that he is “such a weirdo at times and can get on her bloomin nerves”. Through Firmin, ‘the vermin’, she learns that her beloved uncle is a ‘homey setchual’. They will travel to four continents together and the trips promise to be quite bumpy. She is part American, part French, part Italian and finds out, along her journeys to Africa and the Holy Land, that she has other origins too.
THE LITERARY REVIEW: “… Be warned, Zapinette's gems of insouciant wit tend to become infectious. This wise-child's deceptively worldly innocence takes the entire gamut of human endeavor in its compass. Hardly anyone or anything escapes unscathed. Michael Jackson,Vittorio de Sica, Freddy Mercury, Mao Zedong, Bill and Hill, the Pope, Fidel Castro, and even Jesus of Nazareth all come under Zapinette's delightfully zany fire as she “zaps” from topic to topic in an irrepressible flux. As the century of the double zeros is with us + 2016 -, we have seen the future and the future is sham. As a healthy dose of counter-sham, Zapinette should be on every brain-functional person's reading list.”
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY: “… This series is a great ramble, rather like a chapterless Montaigne popping from one subject to the next, drawing connections no one else would ever have thought of, but with Groucho Marx, say, passing on hints over the writer’s shoulder as to how to go about it. We readers chuckle along and even burst out laughing as we advance through this hilarious book, but we gather, we too willy-nilly, the serious messages underlying the frolicking bounce and jocular mode of the writing.”
SMALL PRESS REVIEW: “… The narrator of Albert Russo’s Zapinette series, is a little girl of our time, very knowledgeable about the outside world, but also enormously ignorant of the language commonly used about it, and, as a result, very funny. Her phonetic transcriptions of what she hears and her malapropisms make of her a powerfully distorting lens but, strangely enough, also a reliable witness. Albert Russo has thankfully spared us all the clichés of the genre, and what we read in his novel is a genuine portrait of a genuine child.”
This series which also appeared in the author’s own French translation and was favorably compared to Raymond Queneau’s masterpiece ZAZIE DANS LE METRO, has been discussed at the Catholic University of Paris. It was also offered to the one million subscribers of French Cable Television.
The Zapinette series is published by l’Aleph under the title GOSH ZAPINETTE. 6 episodes have appeared in his own French version and 8 episodes in Italian translation, all to be found on Amazon and other online bookstores.