Book Blurb:
As a hospice nurse, Zara Mitchell has already seen more death than most people will experience in a lifetime. So when her older sister asks her to help care for their ailing grandmother, Zara agrees—despite strained family relationships.
Though pale and tired, Nonna has lost none of her sharp mind. She’s fixated on finding something long forgotten, and she immediately puts Zara to work cleaning out the attic. Unexpectedly, amid the tedium of sifting through knickknacks and heirlooms, Zara also reconnects with a man she’s attracted to but whose complicated past makes romance seem impossible.
But then Zara finds what Nonna was looking for: a wooden chest, an emerald broach, a leather-bound journal. As she immerses herself in stories of heroism and loss set against the backdrop of war-torn Italy in 1943, Zara finds answers to questions she didn’t know she had. And they change everything she thinks she knows about love, regret, and seizing the day.
My Review:
This is a really good read! I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it. I like World War II stories, and this book moves between war time Italy and present day United States. I knew there was a connection between the two time periods, but all of the dots weren’t connected until the very end of the book.
The characters are super well drawn. So three dimensional and real. In fact, in a couple of places I might have shed a tear for the people who endured loss and hardship, and that is true of both the chapters on the past and those on the present. Yet, hope and love are threads that run through the story. The author also has a talent for description. I felt anxious when I was reading about war time Italy because of the suspense in the writing. This was a time in history when ordinary people became heroes as they struggled to survive and liberate themselves from oppression. Yet the part of the book set in the present was just as powerful and compelling.
If I gave ratings on the books I read, I think I’d give this one five stars.
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