The Golden Hour

by Margaret Wurtele

Overview

In this stunning debut set in the summer of 1944 in Tuscany, Giovanna Bellini, the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat and vineyard owner, has just turned seventeen and is on the cusp of adulthood. War bears down on her peaceful little village after the Italians sign a separate peace with the Allies-transforming the Germans into an occupying army.

But when her brother joins the Resistance, he asks Giovanna to hide a badly wounded fighter who is Jewish. As she nurses him back to health, she falls helplessly in love with the brave and humble Marco, who comes from as ancient and noble an Italian family as she does. They pledge their love, and then must fight a real battle against the Nazis who become more desperate and cruel as the Allies close in on them...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451237088
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/07/2012
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Margaret Wurtele and her husband split their time between Minnesota and Napa Valley, where they are the owners of Terra Valentine Winery. This is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

In Wurtele’s fiction debut, Giovanna Bellini, 17, and her wealthy Italian family cope with the Nazi occupation of Tuscany in 1944. Her mother tries to pretend the war isn’t happening, and her father is keen to support whichever side appears to be winning. Giovanna, who is coming into her own as a woman, flirts with kind Nazi Lieutenant Klaus. Meanwhile, her brother, Giorgio, has deserted the Italian army and joined the resistance. She helps him covertly, but soon gets in deeper than she expected when she agrees to hide Marco, a wounded young fighter who’s also Jewish and with whom she falls in love. Wurtele, author of two memoirs, including Touching the Edge: A Mother’s Path from Loss to Life, offers a strong sense of time and place. However, despite the tragedies of wartime, there’s a certain detachment that comes from her descriptions of the beautiful Italian landscape, and the terror of wartime and the occupation don’t feel as urgent as they should. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

In Wurtele's first novel a foolish young Italian girl matures into a caring woman and develops political awareness during World War II. The daughter of wealthy Tuscan estate owners whose home has largely been requisitioned by German officers, Giovanna Bellini is a pampered 17-year-old during the German occupation in 1943. Having graduated from the local Catholic academy, she grudgingly helps the nuns tutor refugee children. Although her older brother Giorgio has run away to join the resistance, she also begins a flirtation with Klaus, a married German officer who she notes is an engineer and not a member of the SS. Wurtele meticulously delineates Giovanna's giddy crush on Klaus, as well as her conflicting self-justification and guilt while purposely keeping Klaus' motives ambiguous so that as events unfold the reader never knows his role--despite the sense of responsibility Giovanna assumes. After a nun catches the two having a rendezvous and tells Giovanna's parents, she arranges one last assignation during which Klaus gets angry when she breaks things off. Meanwhile Giorgio enlists her help in smuggling food and supplies to the partisans. Her work is supposed to be secret, yet she involves an ever-widening circle of friends in the effort. Incredibly, none leaks a word to the enemy. Through Giorgio she meets Mario, an injured partisan who shares a similar upper-class Italian background except that he happens to be Jewish. Giovanna, already doubting that she wants the conventional, safe life her loving but narrow-minded parents expect for her, becomes aware of her own ignorance about the plight of Italian Jews and of her own father's self-serving if genteel anti-Semitism. Mario's injury becomes infected. With help from an unexpected source, she finds him a safe hiding place to recover, then steals him life-saving penicillin from the secret clinic run by a neighboring marchesa, Giovanna's moral mentor. Love also blossoms, the American forces approach, but risks remain high. Giovanna is a wonderful character full of human contradictions, but the novel bogs down once she becomes a conventional noble heroine.

Kirkus Reviews