Review: Echoes of War by Tania Blanchard

In the past few years Australian author Tania Blanchard has seen enormous success with her historical fiction, telling the stories of the real people caught up in pivotal moments in the twentieth century and the impact that is has on the character, and their family. In Echoes of War she turns her focus to Italy. The year is 1936 and Giulia is a headstrong teenager who desperately wants to follow in the footsteps of her Nonna and become a healer. Unfortunately for Giulia, her equally headstrong father wants nothing more than to see his daughters married and living respectable lives. A small deception helps Giulia get the training that she longs for, but it isn't long before life, and the realities of the era--civil unrest and war--soon get in the way. Giulia finds herself bound to her family and duty in ways that she never thought was imaginable.

Although I have enjoyed some of Tania Blanchard's work in the past, I did not enjoy this one anywhere near as much as I had hoped to. I found it difficult to connect with the heroine and many of the situations felt cliched and without giving away any spoilers, melodramatic. That said, I appreciated the historical aspects of this novel, and the glimpse of what life was like in Italy during the Second World War, something that we don't always see or hear of very often in Australia, in spite of the influx of people from Italy to migrated here after the war. (It was, I suppose, a terrible thing that many of the generation who lived though it wanted to forget.) The story also touches on the heartbreak that comes with moving to a new country, and having to say good-bye to family members, and handles it realistically, which redeems some of the earlier melodrama.

Overall, this wasn't a perfect read for me, or perhaps just not the right book at the right time, but that would not put me off reading more of Blanchard's work in the future. 

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my copy of Echoes of War.

This book counts toward my reading goal for the Aussie Author Reading Challenge 2021

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more

Who Else Writes Like V.C. Andrews?

Image
Are there any other authors out there who write similar novels to V.C. Andrews? This is a question I see asked frequently in excellent fan run V.C. Andrews Facebook groups like Attic Secrets and The Dolls Club. In times gone by, The Complete V.C. Andrews webpage (which is no more, but the best bits are archived by Lorraine at the Attic Secrets blog,) had a comprehensive list. Today, I thought I would put forward a few of my own thoughts and recommendations. (Note: This will focus mainly on the series and novels written by the actual V.C. Andrews and not ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, who has a distinctive writing style of his own.) The Classics This is probably the best place to start, as it is likely that some of these novels influenced V.C. Andrews herself. Andrews was a fan of Charles Dickens, mentioning the author in the prologue of her most famous novel Flowers in the Attic. I have yet to read all of Dickens novels (I've read about half,) but I can feel a slight V.C. Andrews vi
Read more