Review: The Italian Ballerina

Title: The Italian Ballerina

Author: Kristy Cambron

Publisher: 12th July 2022 by Thomas Nelson

Pages: 384 pages

How I Read It: ARC book

Genre:  historical fiction, World War II, romance, Italy

My Rating: 4 cups

Synopsis:

A prima ballerina. Two American medics. And a young Jewish girl with no name . . . At the height of the Nazi occupation of Rome, an unlikely band of heroes comes together to save Italian Jews 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.

Based on true accounts of the invented Syndrome K sickness, The Italian Ballerina journeys from the Allied storming of the beaches at Salerno to the London ballet stage and the war-torn streets of WWII Rome, exploring the sometimes heart-wrenching choices we must make to find faith and forgiveness, and how saving just one life can impact countless others.

My Thoughts

Author, Kristy Cambron, writes at the conclusion of her novel: In this way history is powerful. To remember. To learn. To see and understand the human experience through another’s lens. And we hope to give empathy a foothold to grow in our own hearts. Let us be changed. I love this and found her latest book, The Italian Ballerina, to be a wonderful piece of historical fiction full of empathy and hope.

‘A voice inside told Court as sure as anything he’d known in his entire life - he was there for a reason. The reason was her.’

There is a little girl with a battered suitcase, memories she has locked safely away from the invading soldiers. Two kind soldiers who go to incredible lengths to save her and a ballerina who learns what it really means to give and succeed in life. In the contemporary timeline, there is a soccer star who seeks to protect those he loves and a young American searching for answers surrounding a battered suitcase she has inherited from her grandfather. This is an exquisitely written tale that delightfully comes full circle. 

“What does a ballerina have to give? Truly?” Julia tipped her shoulders in a delicate shrug. “I’d dreamed all my life of dancing on the grandest stages in the world. I thought to achieve that would bring me happiness. Or purpose. And it did, for a time. But I stand here with you and find what we’re doing in this one moment matters more to me than all the years of dancing that have come before it. I’m not even certain how I know that, except that I’ve found the most beautiful things in this life to be not of my own hand. And I can see a plan in all of that.”

The only drawback to this wonderful novel is the scattered timelines - rather than being a dual tale there are four timelines that sadly, make it difficult to follow at times. This is compounded through erratic switching and streamlining for smoother transitions would have been desirable. If not for these disconnections I would have rated the book more highly. This is a tale certainly worth reading but concentration is required and flicking back and forth is near impossible on a kindle. 

The Italian Ballerina is a wonderfully rich take full of despair and courage, loss, love and hope. The time spent in modern day Rome and the wartime hospital learning of Syndrome K was a definite highlight. There is romance, drama and the reader walking away all the richer with a full heart. Recommended to lovers of historical fiction. 

“We’re all human, Matt. We all make mistakes and we learn from them. You have to allow for forgiveness in there somewhere. Without grace, none of us would make it a day.”

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.