This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I’m recommending The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller. Known for his moving, intricately plotted stories featuring casts of flawed characters, this book is Miller at his finest. It’s unlike any other historical fiction—okay, really any other book, I’ve read this year.
August, 1943. 14-year-old Massimo is all alone. Newly orphaned and fleeing Rome after surviving the bombing raid that killed his parents, he’s attacked by thugs and finds himself bloodied at the base of the Montecassino. It is there in the Benedictine abbey’s shadow that a charismatic and wily art restorer calling himself Pietro Houdini, rescues Massimo and makes him an assistant in preserving the treasures that lay within the monastery walls. But can Massimo believe what Pietro is saying, particularly when Massimo has secrets of his own? Who is this extraordinary man?
When it becomes evident that Montecassino will soon become the front line in the war, Pietro Houdini shares his plan with Massimo and together they work to smuggle three priceless Titian paintings to safety down the mountain. They are joined by a vivid, likeable cast of characters, and together they will lie, cheat, steal, fight, kill, and sin their way through battlefields to survive. Though it’s fairly obvious based on the book’s time period and action-packed violence, that some gruesome outcomes and horrible atrocities await this group, you still can’t help but root for them to somehow, someway still make it through.
Narrated from forty years in the future and written in the tradition of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, this imaginative chronicle of forgotten history works equally well as a wartime tale, heist thriller, coming-of-age story, and sweeping history and art lesson.
Check out The Curse of Pietro Houdini at the Sioux City Public Library today.
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