The Golden Hour

November 21, 2011
In Wurtele’s fiction debut, Giovanna Bellini, 17, and her wealthy Italian family cope with the Nazi occupation of Tuscany in 1944. Her mother tries to pretend the war isn’t happening, and her father is keen to support whichever side appears to be winning. Giovanna, who is coming into her own as a woman, flirts with kind Nazi Lieutenant Klaus. Meanwhile, her brother, Giorgio, has deserted the Italian army and joined the resistance. She helps him covertly, but soon gets in deeper than she expected when she agrees to hide Marco, a wounded young fighter who’s also Jewish and with whom she falls in love. Wurtele, author of two memoirs, including Touching the Edge: A Mother’s Path from Loss to Life, offers a strong sense of time and place. However, despite the tragedies of wartime, there’s a certain detachment that comes from her descriptions of the beautiful Italian landscape, and the terror of wartime and the occupation don’t feel as urgent as they should.

January 1, 2012
In Wurtele's first novel a foolish young Italian girl matures into a caring woman and develops political awareness during World War II. The daughter of wealthy Tuscan estate owners whose home has largely been requisitioned by German officers, Giovanna Bellini is a pampered 17-year-old during the German occupation in 1943. Having graduated from the local Catholic academy, she grudgingly helps the nuns tutor refugee children. Although her older brother Giorgio has run away to join the resistance, she also begins a flirtation with Klaus, a married German officer who she notes is an engineer and not a member of the SS. Wurtele meticulously delineates Giovanna's giddy crush on Klaus, as well as her conflicting self-justification and guilt while purposely keeping Klaus' motives ambiguous so that as events unfold the reader never knows his role--despite the sense of responsibility Giovanna assumes. After a nun catches the two having a rendezvous and tells Giovanna's parents, she arranges one last assignation during which Klaus gets angry when she breaks things off. Meanwhile Giorgio enlists her help in smuggling food and supplies to the partisans. Her work is supposed to be secret, yet she involves an ever-widening circle of friends in the effort. Incredibly, none leaks a word to the enemy. Through Giorgio she meets Mario, an injured partisan who shares a similar upper-class Italian background except that he happens to be Jewish. Giovanna, already doubting that she wants the conventional, safe life her loving but narrow-minded parents expect for her, becomes aware of her own ignorance about the plight of Italian Jews and of her own father's self-serving if genteel anti-Semitism. Mario's injury becomes infected. With help from an unexpected source, she finds him a safe hiding place to recover, then steals him life-saving penicillin from the secret clinic run by a neighboring marchesa, Giovanna's moral mentor. Love also blossoms, the American forces approach, but risks remain high. Giovanna is a wonderful character full of human contradictions, but the novel bogs down once she becomes a conventional noble heroine.

(COPYRIGHT (2012) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2012
When Nazi soldiers take over their villa, 17-year-old Giovanna Bellini and her parents must relocate to five small rooms in the back of the house. It's 1944, and after Italy makes peace with the Allies, Tuscany is overrun by German occupiers. This smoothly written debut presents Giovanna's coming-of-age as she breaks away from her family's protectiveness and finds a noble calling in aiding Italy's partisan fighters, including her brother, Giorgio. Wurtele captures the innocence and impetuousness of youth as Giovanna explores her attraction to a handsome Nazi lieutenant and later falls in love with Mario, a Jewish man who was badly wounded in the resistance movement. While she risks her life to keep Mario safe, her stubborn father veers between his original Fascist loyalties and his hopes for an Allied victory. The novel is narrated by an older, wiser Giovanna, and her periodic commentary on the dangerous situations unnoticed by her younger self contributes to the suspense. Wurtele carefully looks beyond religious and cultural stereotypes, and her heroine's character growth is moving and realistic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)