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g.donahue, January 27, 2008

A carefully researched historical work of fiction and well worth the read. I love reading historical fiction that informs us of little-known points of history that would otherwise be forgotten, and the story of the resistance in Northern Italy at the end of World War II is one of these notable stories. Thus, the research and resulting story itself wins me over. The rabbis, the priests, the housewives, even the children–all worked together in the mountains and towns of Northern Italy to fight the German Nazi machine---good certainly triumphing over evil in this case. The unexpected heroism of the Italians overcomes the darkness and evil that so clearly took place during this time. But don’t expect a clean, crisp, melodious telling of the story. The tentacles of death found their way to far too many characters to leave one settled. And the tentacles wind their way through far too macabre scenes of grisly murder and wrenching sadness. Technically, I would have been just as intrigued had the author focused more on fewer characters and developed them better. The characters, the setting, and the themes get lost---almost like a Hieronymous Bosch painting with chaos dashing in and out of the scene and every character just a prop. Characters who change names or use other names drop in and out of the picture making it hard for the reader to identify. In reading other reviews of this book, I don’t seem to be alone in this complaint. However, the author does provide a cheat sheet of characters and a map in the beginning to refer to which helps somewhat. Despite this one fault, the story held up as an important and worthy read of a period in history which displayed the extremes of human behavior.

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