The Godfather by Mario Puzo

771 Words4 Pages
Holistic Rating- 9/10 ‘I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse’ The Godfather, a dark, eerie crime thriller set during the 1940s-1950s, following the American mafia throughout the height of their power, a time when organised crime was at its worst. This book follows the fictional tales of the Corleone family through their power struggles with the other rival families of New York. Mario Puzo’s work of art is set as to give an insight into the world of the American mafia, where a simple decision can mean life or death. The book carefully explains all the traits of the Mafia; Murder, Blackmail, extortion, rackets, all of these seem to converge upon the Corleone Family. The book is split into nine separate stories, each one, as progressing through the book will reveal a little more each time to the story. The protagonist, Vito Corleone, head of the Corleone Family, is portrayed as an old but wise man who on the brink of retirement is deciding which son to hand over the ‘businesses’ to. This budding decision is spread across all nine stories, events of course will forever change the way in which the Corleone family operate. This book has by far the best plot of all, it seemed that behind every page there was yet again another twist in the story or another problem for the family to handle, which over the course of the book always gives a real scene of actually being in the mafia alongside them. A downfall for the book is that throughout the nine stories, the plot, at some points, became hard to understand with most certainly too many characters introduced to the reader this became a web of which it was hard to distinguish what character had what background; if I recall two of the nine books only slightly brushed the actual plot, of focusing on telling the events of the infamous mafia. The book is written in the third person with the narrative

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