Last year I discovered the Roma series. Of course, if you've been reading my blog you know that I love books set in Italy. This series got me hooked from the very first book Roma Undergound, set in the city of my mother and her family. Gabriel Valjan gets the Italian culture. What's more, the series has a strong female protagonist, a colorful cast, and a compelling and suspenseful plot. Perfect combination for me!
After reading the 4th book, I was thrilled to find out
Corporate Citizen Book #5 was going to be released Oct 5, 2016!
I've read
Corporate Citizen and my review will be posted on
Essentially Italian tomorrow. Watch out for it. I savored this one as I revisited some of my favorite characters as they got caught up once again in a dangerous situation.
Read my reviews of the series:
Roma Underground
Wasp's Nest
Threading the Needle
Turning to Stone
Today, I have the pleasure of featuring Gabriel Valjan as I interview him about this fun and intelligent series. Read on and make sure to enter the giveaway below!
My Interview with Gabriel Valjan
LCR: Welcome to Library of Clean Reads. The Roma Series
has become one of my favorite series. Did you plan to make this a
series before writing the first book or did it just evolve into one
after publishing?
GV: Thank you for reading and for the
compliment. The Roma Series began as a provocation from
a coworker: create and write about a compelling female protagonist.
At the time, Alias was a hit on television and I was just
entering the world of Andrea Camilleri’s Salvo Montalbano. The
short story, however, focused on a woman named Alabaster and her
employer, Rendition. The rest came much later. When I was completing
Roma, Underground, I realized that I wanted to continue my
foray into Italian culture.
LCR: How did you come up with the idea
of a woman hacker taking on the Italian mafia with a group of
dedicated law enforcers?
GV: The idea of engaging the mafia had not
been my original intention. Rendition investigated white- collar
crime. While I do think Italy and the mafia are unfortunately
synonymous, I was more intrigued by apprehending and prosecuting
criminals for crimes that are lacking in legislation. In researching
the mafia, I realized that it is structurally medieval in
organization, but modern in practice. The Sicilian mafia, for
example, is international, corporate, and involved in both legal and
illegal enterprises.
I created a female character because I
was tired of reading male action figures, or females who were
disguised revisions of male characters. I intended Bianca to be
intelligent, a tech, and a dimensional character with strengths and
weaknesses.
LCR: Being Italian-Canadian, I am
constantly impressed with your knowledge of the Italian culture. To
what do you attribute this?
GV: Thank you for the compliment. I do
research and I am fortunate to have a cultural editor, Claudio
Ferrara, who is a journalist and a linguist. It helps that I have
traveled to Italy and spent time there. What I hope carries over to
the reader is my empathy and openness to Italian culture. Most
Americans have a distorted view of Italian culture, and I try to show
Italy’s diversity. Few people know, for example, that Italy is a
manufacturing giant and peerless when it comes to electronics for
space exploration.
LCR: After reading Corporate
Citizen Book #5 in the series, I was thrilled that you
have Crunch City Book #6
coming up next. Do you plan on continuing the series after Book #6 or
will you decide to end it?
GV: I do plan to continue the Series.
Without giving any spoilers from Book #5, I will state that Crunch
City is the last time that readers will see Bianca in an
English-speaking environment. That decision is an aesthetic and
emotional decision on her part about where she feels ‘home and
family’ exists for her.
LCR: Can you tell me more about any
other works in process?
GV: My publisher, Winter Goose Publishing,
has accepted another series that I created. The Company Files
is a multi-book series about the early days of the intelligence
community. This series draws from real history and individuals. The
writing style is very different from that of the Roma Series.
I would describe it as le Carré meets Chandler.
LCR: Who are your favorite authors and
what have you read recently that is noteworthy?
GV: This is a
difficult question to answer because I read broadly. I have to
confess that I’ve been very frustrated with ‘Contemporary
Fiction’ because I find many of the authors try so hard to be
‘literary’, by which I mean they try to impress me with their
prose or their allusions, as opposed to getting out of their own way
and telling me a good story. Quite a few of these books have won
prestigious awards and praise and, frankly, I just don’t get it. I
read for Character, and many of the books I have picked up or had
recommended to me have unlikeable people, or little transformation in
the overall arc of story and character. I also find that many of
these novels have depressing stories in which life only gets worse
and worse — and I do think that such novels are easier to write and
less imaginative. I’ll read a book that is a difficult journey.
I’ll accept that an ending will not be all sparkles and unicorns,
but I don’t care for nihilism, where I have to reach for Thorazine
to recover from the time spent between the covers. In all fairness,
there are some incredible authors out there in YA, Fantasy, and
Historical Fiction. The challenge is finding them. I love finding a
new author and reading all their work.
I just recently finished Camilleri’s
Montalbano’s First Case. Here, what I found interesting is
that the author, after writing twenty novels with the title
character, had to ‘regress’ and create an immature, less
experienced Montalbano. I’ve also been revisiting Herman Wouk’s
Winds of War and binging on the miniseries. Wouk is a
forgotten master at storytelling.
LCR: If you were to travel back in
time, where would you go?
GV: This is a tough call. A part of me
would like to travel back to the American Revolutionary War era and
witness firsthand what went wrong with the founding principles of my
own country. While America is, indeed, a republic and patrician
elites had created it, I think they would be appalled by what has
become of the government. Another part of me would like to live in
Dante’s era because the worldview is antithetical to our ‘modern’
one.
LCR: Where do you see yourself in five
years from now?
Still writing, but I hope with more
books and more readers. I want to look back five years from now and
see that I am a better writer.
LCR: Thank you so much!
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