Book of the Month: May

The Keeper of Lost Art is by far the best book I read this month. The Retirement Plan was a close second but I could not forget the story of the Italian family who hid paintings from the Nazis during WWII. Days after I read it, I was still pondering the story. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The plot shows us readers what the Italians had to deal with during WWII. This is a viewpoint I have never read about before. The families left behind by the Italian soldiers was fraught with food and gas shortages as well as fear of the Germans who were occupying their country.

The main character is Stella. For Stella's family, they were tested beyond belief. Her uncle, zio Tino, and her aunt, zio Angela, allowed over 200 refugees to live in their wine cellar, for almost a year. Angela, Stella, and her cousins Livia and Mariasole did all of the cooking, using up the family’s private storage of food for these strangers. A representative of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence talks zio Tino into storing a few hundred paintings on the property. Tino is now responsible for preventing the Germans from taking them.

There is so much more to the story but I will leave my synopsis here. Note, however, that the book might be my favorite WWII historical fiction novel of all time. This is a must read.