"Showing off a little - but I am pleased! this morning I was told that the attached review had been posted on-line with www.authorsonline.co.uk
I actually feel like an author - even if that feeling only lasts for a tingly half hour!
Angela.
p.s. I would recommend this self-publishing outfit if you are ever thinking along those lines. They are not cowboys...Just make sure you read and re-read your final draft (or get friends to go over it with a nit comb....or use Maureen Blundell's excellent editing services*) before dispatching your baby. It is so easy to not see glaring howlers! Like I did!!!!!
* I can put you in touch.
Book Review
Never Forget,
Angela Petch – review by Sam Merry
Angela Petch
Angela Petch’s intricate love plot is a good example of how fiction can give truth value-added. Set in “real” time during the tortuous Nazi retreat from Italy on the Gothic Front in the Apennines, 1944, (Churchill’s Third Front), it explores the ordinary lives of ordinary Italians caught in historically exceptional circumstances.
The war is merely the backcloth and the Never Forget of the title stresses the importance of family history in shaping our present, in this case throwing up cultural Anglo/Italian clashes in mixed marriages and the way different national temperaments and circumstances emerge.
Never Forget brilliantly captures ordinary life-loving Italians caught in the bloody mess of war. Petch nicely combines fictional characters with the real background through her Italian family connections and living in a present-day Tuscany home, (Il Mulino - the Mill) where she has studied oral, visual and written sources that give the novel convincing authenticity: the fictional characters are really lovingly-constructed composites of concentrated actual experiences, so that one imagines they are real people.
A youngest English daughter(Anna) thinks she has drawn the short straw when bequeathed her Italian mother and English father’s war time letters and diaries. She leaves stuffy, conventional, England, where she feels an outsider, for colourful Italy to investigate their war time past (he was an escaped POW; she helped the Partisans shelter him). For a reason made clear at the end, she falls in love, first with the country and then an Italian, duplicating her father’s experience in a pair of love stories one generation apart – one sad, the other happy. The tale alternates between present and past, which finally come together neatly in a surprising and satisfying end twist to a most skilful plot.
The central hero is Italy and the spirit of its people against the slumbering ghost of Mussolini’s war – “standing in the crisp sunshine, mountains soaring into a perfect sky, it is impossible to imagine such an appalling event” – but always the beautiful countryside and warmth of its people bubble up through every page, haunting the story’s duality of love and hate, a polarisation also reflected in the characterisation of cold, repressed England and life-loving Italy in a life and death struggle which is symbolised by the war-caused breakdown of the English father and violent abuse of his Italian wife.
But this story is ultimately about human hope and by the end, you will have fallen in love with Italy. As Francesco comments, “what is wrong with the idea of mixing up (national) differences...and creating a wonderful new recipe?"
You may even be desperate to visit Angela Petch’s 'Il Mulino' in the beautiful Apennines, where you may take a holiday
Angela Petch’s intricate love plot is a good example of how fiction can give truth value-added. Set in “real” time during the tortuous Nazi retreat from Italy on the Gothic Front in the Apennines, 1944, (Churchill’s Third Front), it explores the ordinary lives of ordinary Italians caught in historically exceptional circumstances.
The war is merely the backcloth and the Never Forget of the title stresses the importance of family history in shaping our present, in this case throwing up cultural Anglo/Italian clashes in mixed marriages and the way different national temperaments and circumstances emerge.
Never Forget brilliantly captures ordinary life-loving Italians caught in the bloody mess of war. Petch nicely combines fictional characters with the real background through her Italian family connections and living in a present-day Tuscany home, (Il Mulino - the Mill) where she has studied oral, visual and written sources that give the novel convincing authenticity: the fictional characters are really lovingly-constructed composites of concentrated actual experiences, so that one imagines they are real people.
A youngest English daughter(Anna) thinks she has drawn the short straw when bequeathed her Italian mother and English father’s war time letters and diaries. She leaves stuffy, conventional, England, where she feels an outsider, for colourful Italy to investigate their war time past (he was an escaped POW; she helped the Partisans shelter him). For a reason made clear at the end, she falls in love, first with the country and then an Italian, duplicating her father’s experience in a pair of love stories one generation apart – one sad, the other happy. The tale alternates between present and past, which finally come together neatly in a surprising and satisfying end twist to a most skilful plot.
The central hero is Italy and the spirit of its people against the slumbering ghost of Mussolini’s war – “standing in the crisp sunshine, mountains soaring into a perfect sky, it is impossible to imagine such an appalling event” – but always the beautiful countryside and warmth of its people bubble up through every page, haunting the story’s duality of love and hate, a polarisation also reflected in the characterisation of cold, repressed England and life-loving Italy in a life and death struggle which is symbolised by the war-caused breakdown of the English father and violent abuse of his Italian wife.
But this story is ultimately about human hope and by the end, you will have fallen in love with Italy. As Francesco comments, “what is wrong with the idea of mixing up (national) differences...and creating a wonderful new recipe?"
You may even be desperate to visit Angela Petch’s 'Il Mulino' in the beautiful Apennines, where you may take a holiday
This review appeared today on the Authors on Line website on
20th March 2013
