My good friend Jeff recommended this book to me, and I am so glad he did.
I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and granted, even the author says this is fictionalized history. And if you read other reviews here you will see the common thread of complaint about the writing style. Yeah, yeah, get over it. Sullivan does over dramatize here and he admits that he consolidated some events for literary purpose. I listened to this one on Audible, so maybe it was a bit less painful than had I read it, but do not read this for the prose or writing style, read it for Pino. Read it for his story and to give acknowledgement to an oft overlooked chapter of world history.
Pino Lella was an 17-yr old Italian boy when war came to his hometown of Milan, Italy. Knowing he is about to be drafted, his family sends him to Father Ray and the mountains, where he begins one of many adventures in helping defeat the Nazis before coming back to Milan and beginning an assignment he resisted and then embraced. Over the next 18 months or so, the things Pino sees, experiences and witnesses seem made for the movies and seem too far fetched to be real. But this is war - old timey get your guns and crash through the blockade War. I don't want to give away too much here, but if you can get through the first 1/4 of the book (which is slow), you will be amazed at what you will experience through Pino's eyes. An extraordinary man during an almost impossible time, his story is fantastical and leaves many questions unanswered about how things were run in Italy during the war. Other WWII novels focus on Germany, but Italy not so much - even in the history books. I was fascinated also by the afterword about the rest of Pino's amazing life, which even 60 years later is still shadowed by what he experienced, who he knew, and what happened.
Definitely worth a listen.
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