Sally is like that friend you have. The one you know you'll have a great time with if you're together, but you don't really go out of your way to call and make plans with. Thanks to #netgalley and #macmillanaudio, I was able to listen to that friend in beautiful Italy in this #arc. While her Italian Adventure was a slow build for me, once I was committed to the journey I wanted to see it through.

Hers isn't a tale of your standard historical fiction female lead. What she does have in common with many of those expected heroines is that hers is a different version of a woman finding her own strength when that was all that she had left. While I had fun with it, there were quite a few sub story lines that left me wanting more or at least more closure. The plus side, is that I guess I cared enough to want to hear those pieces out, the down side is that I'll never know. Either way, I would definitely recommend this audio book. I thought the narrator was perfect for the story and more than once I found myself longing for a glass of rich Brunello in the gorgeous Tuscan countryside.

As a huge fan of The Italian Party, I was curious to see what Christina Lynch would do next. Her sophomore effort was almost a tale of two stories. I now know why I saw several reviews from readers that refused to finish the book. I was not a fan of the first half, but came around in the second.
Sally Brady has a rough start to life, as an 11 year old in the Depression sent off by her parents to find work in California. As luck would have it, she’s adopted by a film star. The story quickly moves to prewar Italy. Sally is a gal with the ability to land on her feet no matter the circumstances.
The story is told and alternates between 3 perspectives. The first is Sally’s, who has gone on to become an impossibly young gossip columnist. Lapo, an Italian writer and farmer, whose writing Mussolini takes a fancy to, and his son, Alessandro, aged 17, an anti-fascist but still of draft age. He ends up in the Italian army in Prague.
It’s obvious that Lynch was trying to balance the humor inherent in the idea of a young gossip columnist caught in Italy with the horrors the Italian government visited on their country. But the first half of Sally’s story comes across as trite and silly. To be honest, I initially found her irritating in the extreme. “I was careful to wear my red arm band, even when it clashed with my outfit.”
I was much more interested in Lapo’s and Allessandro’s stories. Here, Lynch doesn’t attempt to be silly. These two are allowed to bear serious witness to what’s happening. “Alessandro remembered one of his professors saying that as societies collapse they spend more money on wars, police and prisons.”
The story is slow to start, taking ages to get to what I would consider the “meat” of the story. Once it did, though, I became more engaged. Sally becomes more real, not quite so silly. In essence, she grows up.
Elise Roth is the narrator and captures Sally’s devil may care, perky manner. She’s less successful on the parts of the story concerning Lapo and Alessandro. In fact, her attempt at a voice for Felice Pappone made him sound like a boy, not a 6’2” bruiser of a man.
My thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan Audio for an advance copy of this book.