Title: Escape To Florence by: Kat Devereaux

Title: Escape To Florence

Author: Kat Devereaux

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks

Source: e-book ARC ( 272 p.) NetGalley

Description:

Moving between the Second World War and the present, an exhilarating debut novel in the vein of Jennifer Robson, Kate Quinn, and Natasha Lester, about two women, decades apart, whose fates converge in Florence, Italy. Only fourteen, Stella Infuriati is the youngest member of her town’s resistance network during World War II. Risking torture and death, she relays messages, supplies, and weapons to partisan groups in the Tuscan hills. Her parents have no idea, consumed instead by love and fear for their beloved son, Achille, a courier and unofficial mechanic for a communist partisan brigade. Then, after 1945, Stella seemingly vanishes from the records. Her name and story are overshadowed by the tragic death of her brother—until a young writer arrives in Tuscany in the spring of 2019, uncovering long-buried secrets. Fleeing an emotionally abusive marriage and a lonely life on an isolated estate, Tori MacNair has come to Florence, the beautiful city her grandmother taught her to love, to build a new life. As she digs into her family history with the help of Marco, a handsome lawyer, Tori starts to uncover secrets of the past—truths that stretch back decades, to a young woman who risked everything to save her world . . .  

My Thoughts: 

This book was an incredible journey that takes Tori McNair from Scotland to Florence after her grandmother's death and needing to leave her husband who isn't good for her.  She learns about her family mainly her grandmother's life prior to getting married.  

It also takes us to a young girl named Stella whose working with the resistance to fight what is happening in Italy back during WWII and in,  This life for Stella was hard if not difficult at times.  But definitely worth the adventure as we see how she changes through the years and what happened to her when paper trails of her evaporate.  No one knows what happened to her after 1945.  What became of her?

I really enjoyed the writing and story telling in this book.  I had only wished that Tori's family was more understanding to her and her situation. (Don't want to give any spoilers I'm not that kind of reviewer :) ).  It was great to see Tori make her own choices without other people impacting her.  

I think people who love Kate Quinn and even those who like Susan Elia MacNeal.  She keeps you captivated to your seat wanting to see what happens and how the story will play out and you can also feel like you are there with everyone in WWII.

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Pride Month

As Pride month hits I wanted to take the time and showcase some books for this month I myself haven't read them but someone might enjoy them.

So let's go: 

Solomon's Crow:

Two destined rivals fall desperately in love—but the fate of medieval Europe hangs in the balance.

“A pair of thrones between us, and my heart clutched like a rosary within his hands ...”

Twelfth-century Europe. Newly-crowned King Philip of France is determined to restore his nation to its former empire and bring glory to his name. But when his greatest enemy, King Henry of England, threatens to end his reign before it can even begin, Philip is forced to make a precarious alliance with Henry’s volatile son—risking both his throne, and his heart.

Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, never thought he would be King. But when an unexpected tragedy makes him heir to England, he finally has an opportunity to overthrow the father he despises. At first, Philip is a useful tool in his quest for vengeance... until passion and politics collide, and Richard begins to question whether the crown is worth the cost.

When Philip and Richard find themselves staring down an impending war, they must choose between their desire for one another and their grand ambitions. Will their love prevail, if it calls to them from across the battlefield? Teeming with royal intrigue and betrayal, this epic romance reimagines two real-life kings ensnared by an impossible choice: Follow their hearts, or earn their place in history.

Choosing Family: A memoir of Queer Motherhood & Black Resistance

A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts , this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.

Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family , ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

Dyscalculia

When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything—from her early childhood trauma and mental health to her relationship with mathematics—shows up in the tapestry of her healing. In this exquisite and raw reflection, Felix repossesses herself through the exploration of history she’d left behind, using her childhood “dyscalculia”—a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math—as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in love. Through reckoning with this breakup and other adult gambles in intimacy, Felix asks the question: Who gets to assert their right to pain?

 

Felix negotiates the misalignments of perception and reality, love and harm, and the politics of heartbreak, both romantic and familial.

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