Sunflower Publishing Book Reviews

    The Girl Who Escaped By Angela Petch Description Italy, 1940. The girl sobs and rages as her father tells her the terrible news. “Italy is entering the war alongside Germany. Jews are to be arrested and sent to camps. We have to be ready.” As fascists march across the cobbled piazzas and past the towered buildings of her beloved home city, twenty-year-old  Devora ’s worst fears come true. Along with her Jewish parents and twin little brothers they are torn away from everything they love and sent to an internment camp huddled in the mountains. Her father promises this war will not last long… When they are offered a miraculous chance of escape by her childhood friend  Luigi , who risks everything to smuggle vital information into the camp, the family clambers under barbed wire and races for the border. But Devora is forced to make a devastating choice between saving a stranger’s life and joining her parents. As shots fire in the moonless night,  the family is ...

  A Chance in A Million   By TA Williams SUMMARY Having left the army to recover from a traumatic experience,  Captain Jane Reed  is on her way to Venice to assist  Lady Veronica Cooper , a world-famous writer who has lost her mojo. Plagued by grief and sleepless nights, Jane soon finds a kindred spirit in Veronica, coping with her own loss after the death of her husband. When the two relocate to Veronica’s villa in the countryside to escape the summer tourists, Jane meets the rest of the Cooper family – including Veronica’s brooding son,  David . With his own tragic past, David has resigned himself to a life of solitude. Jane finds herself determined to bring joy back into his life, even if it means finally spilling her secrets. Can Jane and David help each other heal, and find love in the process, or are some scars too deep to treat?   MY REVIEW: Destiny, sometimes referred to as fate is a predetermined course of events or is it? I re...

                                                              The Tuscan Secret By Angela Petch SUMMARY: ll Mulino. An old crumbling mill, by a winding river, nestled in the Tuscan mountains. An empty home that holds memories of homemade pasta and Nonna’s stories by the fire, and later: the Nazi invasion, and a family torn apart by a heartbreaking betrayal. Anna is distraught when her beloved mother, Ines, passes away. She inherits a box of papers, handwritten in Italian and yellowed with age, and a tantalizing promise that the truth about what happened during the war lies within.  The diaries lead Anna to the small village of Rofelle, where she slowly starts to heal as she explores sun-kissed olive groves, and pieces together her mother’s past: happy days spent herding sheep across Tuscan meadows cruelly interrupted ...

  Two Women in Rome By Elizabeth Buchan SUMMARY: Lottie Archer arrives in Rome excited to begin her new job as an archivist. When she discovers a valuable fifteenth-century painting, she is drawn to find out more about the woman who left it behind, Nina Lawrence. Nina seems to have led a rewarding and useful life, restoring Italian gardens to their full glory following the destruction of World War Two. So why did no one attend her funeral in 1978? In exploring Nina's past, Lottie unravels a tragic love story beset by the political turmoil of post-war Italy. And as she edges closer to understanding Nina, she begins to confront the losses in her own life. MY REVIEW: T his is a powerful read and I almost feel that the understated and minimal title ‘Two Women in Rome’ belies a weighty and intricate storyline about Lottie and Nina. Two stories run in conjunction and are self-perpetuating. The more Lottie reads from Nina’s private journal, the more we discover about the lives of each...