Virginia Baily

Audiobook, so it's hard to give a fair review of the text itself. Another book where the brief description skewed my expectation of the story. I had expected there to be more about Danieli, the young boy who was snatched from the line of Jews being sent to the Nazi camps. Instead, the story focuses on the emotions of the woman who saved him and those of the 16yr old girl who has just found out she is his illegitimate son. The tale moves back and forth between current times and war times.
The audio version was dramatically read with a strong Italian accent appropriate to the main character. However this meant that the volume varied also--extremely difficult to maintain an appropriate volume setting on my device as I listen to this while driving, and so quite a bit of the book was not heard.… (más)

I came across Virginia Baily’s Early One Morning via the Readings catalogue back in 2015, and was intrigued by the blurb. It’s about an Italian woman who rescues a child from the Nazi round-up of Jews, and what happens afterwards.
It’s not really a book about war or about the Holocaust, but more about how it is much harder to work with traumatised children than it seems and about how the urge to find out about parents and forebears isn’t always a quest with a happy ending. But it’s not a grim book: it is surprisingly humorous in places, with some splendid self-deprecating female central characters undercutting any pretensions to heroism or self-pity. It is also a book centred on female preoccupations: the perspectives of the male characters have to be inferred. And while some of the plotting is a little flimsy, the fact is that – not many, not enough – but some Jewish children were rescued, and were hidden, and afterwards they and the people who had come to love them, had to deal with what happened to parents murdered in the Holocaust.
The book is written in two strands: the historical narrative, set in the latter years of the war when the Nazis occupy Rome (though they are almost entirely off-stage); and in the 1970s, where the Welsh daughter of the rescued Jewish child comes to Rome to try to reclaim her Italian heritage when she inadvertently discovers that the father who has loved her all her life is not her biological father. Maria is at that awkward adolescent age and she retaliates for the lie her parents have never got round to redressing by sulking in her room, sabotaging her own exam performance and taking up smoking. And, crucially for the plot trajectory, she uses the letter that triggered her discovery to make contact with Signora Chiara in Rome and descends on Chiara’s tiny apartment to try to find out about her father.
What she doesn’t know, because Chiara lets her think that she was merely Daniele’s landlady, is that Chiara actually fostered the boy. She took him on despite having lost her mother when the family apartment was bombed; having had her fiancé killed by the fascists; and having a disabled sister and an ancient Nonna to care for. But Daniele becomes the child she would have had if Carlo had lived. She cares for him all through the difficult war years, through bombs, hunger and privation not to mention the risk that the Germans will identify him as Jewish, and afterwards when – discovering the fate of his parents – Daniele goes badly off the rails with drugs. Chiara knew nothing about Maria’s mother’s holiday romance with the adolescent Daniele, and she, like Daniele himself, knew nothing about the baby that was the result. And much as she loves him, she has seen nothing of Daniele for many years and doesn’t know where he is.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/08/12/early-one-morning-by-virginia-baily-bookrevi...… (más)