I gave this story 5 stars on Good Reads, and if I could I would double it to 10.

This beautiful and tragic story is told in alternating viewpoints and with gorgeous language. The author’s level of detail is so deep, there are times I feel the vibrating of the Freddie’s Lancaster bombers and smell the paint on Isabella’s palette.

The opening chapters had me in tears, not so much for the separated lovers, but Freddie’s feelings as he prepares to bomb his beloved Florence are exquisitely—can you tell I love Florence?—and vividly detailed.

So the story broke my heart at the very start and continued to stomp it into little pieces as I continued to read. The writing held the story up, like the music of a cello, if you follow me, deeply sad yet uplifting at the same time.

The narrative returns to when Isabella and Freddie met in 1937 in art school as Mussolini rose to power, along with Oskar, a German Jew, and Francesco, the Maestro and his assistant, the evil Fosco. From there, we follow the ensemble cast at they navigate Nazi occupied Italy.

While I read, and many times when I read stories from this era of occupied Europe, I’m always struck by how neighbors turn on neighbors or how some become partisans and fight. Isabella just wants to paint, to create, while all she knows is being destroyed from within and from above. She loves Freddie, but her fatalist attitude won’t let her see past today and the occupation, the war. When a German officer takes an interest in her, her fear of what her neighbors think conflicts with her fears of reprisal in not going along with the occupiers. Survival for Oskar is centered on his young daughter, Esme, and returning to Florence, where he knows Isabella will help him, and Francesco, after the truly foolish mistake of losing his crush Marina’s diary, and which eventually leads him to join the partisans.

This is a dark story, though, like the cello, there are moments of joy. Torture and escape. Starvation and a generous stranger. Terror and wonder.

A skillful juggler keeping many characters and actions in the air at the same time with short chapters leaving you hanging on to read what is going to happen next impels this book. The British air war and the artist milieu in Florence during the last part of the WW2 in simultaneous settings draws you in. The characters are multi-dimensional and give us reasons to care about them. All-in-all quite a memorable read.