Saturday, March 1, 2025

The Italian Ballerina by Kristy Cambron

Genre: Dual-timeline 
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Released: July 12, 2022
360 pages
About the Book:

At the height of the Nazi occupation of Rome, an unlikely band of heroes comes together to save innocent lives 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.

 
My Rating & Thoughts:    

Told from three different perspectives in multiple timelines and jumped between each time in no particular order. At one point we'd be in 1943, then 1939, then 1941, then present day. I found it very hard to follow. It took me a long time to care about any of the characters as I felt like it took a long time to get to know any of them. I found myself frustrated with a choice one of the characters made in the present day timeline. I found it hard to comprehend why they would do this. The ending left me wondering what happened to one of the people from the past. I did get emotional when a certain thing happened to one of the characters, but overall I was bored and frustrated most of the time. This was a miss.

(I purchased my copy of this book; opinions expressed 
in this review are my honest opinion and completely my own.)

Other books from this author that I have reviewed:   

   

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