By Kelly Bridgewater
A prima ballerina. Two American
medics. And a young Jewish girl with no name . . . At the height of the Nazi
occupation of Rome, an unlikely band of heroes comes together to save Italian
Jews in this breathtaking World War II novel based on real historical events.
Rome,
1943. With the fall of Italy’s Fascist
government and the Nazi regime occupying the streets of Rome, British ballerina
Julia Bradbury is stranded and forced to take refuge at a hospital on Tiber
Island. But when she learns of a deadly sickness that is sweeping through the
quarantine wards—a fake disease known only as Syndrome K—she is drawn into one
of the greatest cons in history. Alongside hospital staff, friars of the
adjoining church, and two Allied medics, Julia risks everything to rescue
Italian Jews from the deadly clutches of the Holocaust. But when one little
girl who dreams of becoming a ballerina arrives at their door, Julia and the
others are determined to reunite the young dancer with her family—if only she
would reveal one crucial secret: her name.
Present
Day. With the recent loss of her
grandfather—a beloved small-town doctor and WWII veteran—Delaney Coleman
returns home to help her aging parents, even as she struggles to pick up the
pieces of her own life. When a mysterious Italian woman claims she owns one of
the family’s precious heirlooms, Delaney is compelled to uncover what’s true of
her grandfather’s hidden past. Together with the woman’s skeptical but charming
grandson, Delaney learns of a Roman hospital that saved hundreds of Jewish people
during the war. Soon, everything Delaney thought she knew about her grandfather
comes into question as she wrestles with the possibility that the man she’d
revered all her life had unknown ties to Rome and may have taken noble secrets
to his grave.
Based on true accounts of the invented Syndrome K
sickness, The Italian
Ballerina journeys from the Allied storming of the beaches at
Salerno to the London ballet stage and the war-torn streets of WWII Rome,
exploring the sometimes heart-wrenching choices we must make to find faith and
forgiveness, and how saving just one life can impact countless others.
My
Thoughts:
My favorite aspect of The Italian Ballerina by Kristy Cambron is the cover. It is eye
catching. I love having the heroine with her back to the audience as German
planes fly overhead to show the audience the time period the novel takes place in.
For the plot structure, this plot was organized a lot like Cambron's previous
novel, The Paris Dressmaker. She
jumps from 1939 to 1941 to 1943 to 1944 and to the present day throughout the
whole novel. Not in chronological order at all. A couple of times, I had to
flip back and see what time period the current chapter was in, and then flip to
the story's perspective, so I could understand what was going on. This makes it
really confusing to follow along. It takes about forty percent of the novel
before the different time period clicks into place. I do not understand why the
story can not be told in chronological order with the past, then flip to the
present like most time-slip novels. Anyways, the idea of the World War II story
was fascinating, once I figured out who was actually going on. I liked the
story of the little girl. I enjoyed the present tense story and seeing how it
actually solves many mysteries from the past. Would I say this is one of my
favorite Cambron novels? No. The timeline makes it really hard to enjoy. Of
course, the romance happens in both time periods and settles with a pretty
little bow at the end of the story. Overall, The Italian Ballerina by Kristy Cambron had a out of time timeline,
so it is really confusing to follow what is happening for a long time.
I received a complimentary copy of The Italian Ballerina by Kristy Cambron
from Thomas Nelson Publishing, but the opinions stated are all my own.
My
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Purchase The Italian Ballerina
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