I love books that take me to foreign countries and let me experience the food, culture, and climate.
This one takes the reader to the high mountains of Italy, where we explore the imaginary town of Montevino and it's colorful characters.
An excellent historical, slice of life, coming of age novel with a romantic thread that captures the reader and makes me wish for a visit to Italy.
Heartwarming and hearttugging. A wonderful read.
The only bits that through me out were the uses of British words/phrases in an Itlaian setting as I'm an American.
Note: this does have a fade to black intimacy scene for those sweet romance readers out there.
This is my first read by Ms. Sacerdoti. I would read another novel of hers.
Callie, a lonely small-town waitress, is still reeling from the discovery that she’s adopted when she arrives in Montevino, Italy in search of answers – the keys to the stunning hillside villa she has just inherited clutched tightly in her hand. Inside the rusted gates, and through a large wooden front door dripping with sun-kissed flowers, Callie can’t decide if she’s more astonished by her new home or her first encounter with the mysterious young groundskeeper, Tommaso.
Wandering the villa barefoot at night, Callie finds a diary belonging to a woman named Elisa, wrapped in faded blue ribbon and hidden in her birthmother’s antique wardrobe. Page by page, Callie is swept away by its story of love, passion, heartbreak and betrayal as she reads how Elisa married her childhood sweetheart in secret before fleeing to the woods to join the resistance. They vowed to find each other again when the war was over, but history had other plans.
Callie is certain that her and Elisa’s lives are somehow connected, and that the truth about her family is hidden somewhere within the diary’s crinkled yellow pages. It gives her the courage to start asking questions around the close-knit village until, at long last, she feels her closed-off heart begin to open. Perhaps even enough to let someone in…
But when a devastating betrayal in the final pages of the diary unlocks a heart-breaking secret about who Callie’s mother really is, the chance for a new life shatters in front of her. Can she persuade the locals to forgive her past and accept the truth about her identity?
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