Beneath the Scarlet Sky By Mark Sullivan

 

Beneath the Scarlet Sky

By Mark Sullivan

This story follows Pino Lella, an Italian teenager, who becomes enmeshed in World War II when he is enlisted as the driver for a high ranking German official.

Pino is sent to a mountain getaway/school by his parents in order to keep him safe when the bombing reaches his Italian city. There, he helps to get Jews across the border to Switzerland to escape the Nazis.

Afterward, when he returns home and is at the age of enlistment to be drafted into the war effort, he is noticed by General Leyers, who asks for Pino to become his driver, taking him around Italy to various appointments and battle positions. Pino saves Leyers's life a couple times, even though Pino himself is against the Nazis and is working undercover as a spy, relaying information to his uncle who is part of the resistance movement.

Throughout the story Pino is forming a romantic relationship with Anna, who is the maid to Leyers's mistress, and a woman he asked out on a date when he was seventeen who stood him up. There romance develops until the resistance gets the upper hand and starts to kill anyone who was closely involved with the Nazis, including Anna. Pino swears revenge on Leyers for it, and other killings, but ends up being conscripted once the tides have turned to chauffeur Leyers once more, but this time for the Allies. Pino ends up letting Leyers live and go free, realizing that he too is responsible for Anna's death.

I could tell this book was self-published. There was a lot of telling going on, and the structural breaks in the narrative gave that away. I was hoping this would be a different sort of WWII narrative, but it wasn't doing anything really new. I'm not sure why it was so popular. The writing wasn't terrible, but I could tell it was self-published. There were a lot of plot conveniences. The story idea is a good one. All in all, it was just an average read. I'm giving it 3 stars.