Escape To Florence

Yesterday on July 4^th I finished reading an early copy of Escape To Florence by Kat Deveraux. The book has dual timelines going from 2019 to World War II. In 2019 Tori McNair attends her grandmother’s funeral and after that flees an emotionally abusive marriage and goes to Florence where her and her grandmother took vacations during her childhood. During World War II, Stella Infuriati at fourteen is the youngest member of the resistance network risking torture and death she relay’s messages supplies and weapons to partisan groups. Of course there is a connection with Tori’s grandmother and Stella’s story.

Pros

I like the idea for the story. I also love Florence as the setting and it’s nice that the book covered World War II History in Italy. I also like Stella as a character. I loved reading Stella’s parts of the book and wished she had gotten more coverage.

Cons

Unfortunately while the idea was good, what I didn’t like was it seemed to cover Tori more than it did Stella. I like dual timelines, but when you do dual timelines both characters should have an equal amount of story time and unfortunately Stella did not. The book would have benefitted if it was longer instead of it being rushed. Unfortunately there haven’t been many books that cover World War II Italy very well and it’s a shame because Italy does have interesting history especially when it comes to World War II.

Overall

Overall the idea was great but the execution could have been better. Escape To Florence will be released on July 11^th of this year, if you are interested in World War II historical fiction preorder the book, wait till its released to buy it or get it from the library. Thank you Heather Drucker for the early copy of the book.