For our next discussion book, I thought we’d go back to fiction. It’s a story set during one of my favorite time periods – World War II. The book is “Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel” by Mark Sullivan and here’s the info from the book jacket:
“Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager—obsessed with music, food, and girls—but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.
In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a 
German soldier—a move they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.
Now, with the opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by fighting in secret, his courage bolstered by his love for Anna and for the life he dreams they will one day share.
Fans of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Unbroken will enjoy this riveting saga of history, suspense, and love.”
Hope you’ll join me in reading “Beneath a Scarlet Sky.” It looks like a good one! We’ll have our virtual book discussion in late March.
Book Thoughts from Bed 
Sounds like a good one, Michelle!
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I agree this sounds good! Also, wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed Monkey God. I’ve passed the recommendation on to several others. It just boggles my mind how much we DON’T know! ~ Mary
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Glad you liked Monkey God!
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Hi Michelle! I’m home schooling Ben this semester and we are studying WWII in about a month. This might be a good book to read while studying WWII. Do you think it is 13-year old appropriate?
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Oh my gosh! Ben’s a teenager! Can’t comment on whether this book is age appropriate, but if you scroll down and take a look at the other Jeanne’s comments, she thinks it might be.
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Excellent choice! I read it on my own rating it as 5 stars, recommended to one of my book clubs, reread it and again gave it 5 Stars! Everyone on club loved it! 📚👍📚👏👏👏👏
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I have already read Beneath a Scarlet Sky and thoroughly enjoyed it…I think a 13 year old could handle it, there’s no explicit sex or anything; tho there is one incredibly shocking scene that made me gasp. I’ll participate in the book club discussion as well. Another wonderful book I just finished (and had never heard about before…is Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. From Wikipedia: Kindred is a time-travel and slave narrative novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler. First published in 1979, it is still widely popular; it is regularly chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organizations, as well as being a common choice for high school and college courses.
The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself shuttled between her California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a spoiled, self-destructive white slave owner and the proud black freewoman he has forced into slavery and concubinage. As her stays in the past become longer, Dana becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community, making hard compromises to survive slavery and to ensure her existence in her own time.
Written to underscore the courageous endurance of people perceived as chattel, Kindred examines the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery as well as its legacy in present American society. Through the two interracial couples that form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism.
While most of Butler’s work is classified as science-fiction, Kindred crosses disciplinary boundaries and so is often shelved under literature or African-American literature. Butler has categorized the work as “a kind of grim fantasy.”
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Excellent! I actually started reading this right after the Christmas holidays. I got sidetracked and didn’t finish it, which is never a comment on the book. I look forward to finishing it and joining in the conversation.
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