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11:08:00 AM EDT
A THREAD OF GRACE
Classes ended last Friday, then I slept for fourteen hours and finished A Thread of Grace. It was a long wait between books for Mary Doria Russell, and what a very different book from her first two - but the wait was certainly worth it.
A belief in grace is all that keeps me from swallowing ground glass most days, and that thread does run through this book. A difficult but compelling read, a story of great evil and great compassionate goodness existing side by side - an account I hadn't heard before. It's the story of Northern Italy at the tail end of WW II, the Italians finished with war, the Germans desperate to hold a front, the Jews who had escaped from occupied Southern France over the Alps hoping to find a safe haven in Italy, the partisans fighting a guerilla warfare against the Germans on their soil. There's a large number of characters, but once I had time to really settle down and read without constant interruption I had no trouble with the large cast.
It's done without stereotyping - not all the Italian peasants are generous and good, not all the Nazis are unredeemably evil, but don't get too attached to anyone in the story - there is a low survival rate, I must warn you. Not that it's unexpected, but it is a heartbreaking book. Heartbreaking but full of the wonders of grace, the miracle of the human spirit.
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8/23/05 6:51 PM