Sunflower Publishing Book Reviews

    The Last Letter from Sicily by Lindsay Marie Morris SUMMARY: ‘My dearest Gaetano, if this letter reaches you, know that my heart remains under the Sicilian stars where we made our promise...’ Sicily, 1939. Seventeen-year-old Concetta has just received life-changing news: her family is leaving their sun-drenched Sicilian village and moving to America. Desperate to stay with her secret love Gaetano—a fisherman’s son her father would never accept—Concetta spends one last night with him beneath a blanket of stars. There, among the citrus-scented air and cricket song, he hands her a leaving gift: a fountain pen, with a promise to keep their love alive through letters – and return to each other one day. In America, Concetta refuses to let go of her dream of returning to Sicily, even as she struggles to navigate a strange new world of factory work and prejudice. Her letters to Gaetano become her lifeline, each one carrying fragments of her heart across ...

    In the Shadows of the Apennines by Kimberly Sullivan SUMMARY: The sleepy little Abruzzo mountain town of Marsicano seems about as far as Samantha can flee from her failed marriage and disastrous university career. Eager for a fresh start, Samantha begins to set down roots in her Italian mountain hideaway. At first, the mountain retreat appears idyllic, but an outsider’s clumsy attempts at breaking into the closed mountain community are quickly thwarted when the residents discover Samantha’s snarky blog ridiculing the town and its inhabitants. Increasingly isolated in her mountain cottage, Samantha discovers the letters and diaries of Elena, a past tenant and a survivor of the 1915 Pescina earthquake. Despite the fact that a  century separates the two women, Samantha feels increasingly drawn into Elena’s life, and discovers startling parallels with her own. MY REVIEW: T his is an intriguing and absorbing story about how someone from the past rescues someone...

    Lest We Forget (Per Non Dimenticare) By Dr Allison Buck SUMMARY: Italy is full of idyllic hilltop towns teeming with centuries of history. Soriano nel Cimino, located in the Tuscia region of Lazio is one of those. On June 5, 1944, the day after Rome was liberated, this small town was nearly destroyed by Allied bombing. In 1994 for the 50th anniversary of the bombing, first-hand testimonies were collected and printed by some of the survivors and made available in Italian. This book contains those same testimonies of devastation, resilience, strength, and re-birth translated into English. It includes testimonies from fascists, antifascists, and partisans. Cold-blooded murder by the hands of the Nazis as they retreated to the north and scavenged to find enough wood and nails in the rubble to build the coffins to bury the almost 200 victims of the bombing. Soriano nel Cimino has now been rebuilt, but scars still run deep in the generations which followed. Every day the...