THE CAVES OF SAN PIETRO

An American soldier in Italy during World War II revisits painful memories from his troubled childhood in this novel.

In 1943, Sgt. Frank Moster is part of a massive landing of Allied forces at Salerno Bay, a concerted effort to drive the occupying Nazis out of Italy. Frank is separated from his company in the bloody chaos of it all—German soldiers give the Allies a violent reception. He becomes acquainted with the Pernas, an Italian family exhausted by the tyranny of Nazi brutality—they are worn down by the constant danger and the pain of terrible scarcity. Frank speaks perfect Italian as well as German—after his Italian birthparents both died, he was adopted by a German family—and takes it upon himself to protect the Pernas. Meanwhile, he develops a romantic attachment to Ida Perna, the eldest daughter in the family, a fiery woman who bravely works for the Italian resistance. Gayle tells two parallel stories—Frank’s experiences as a soldier in Italy, and his challenging childhood. Frank’s parents were originally from Italy but escaped the clutches of the Mafia by exiling themselves to New York. Frank became an orphan when his father was murdered by the mob and his mother succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1919. The author vividly captures the harshness of Nazi rule and the bravery of the Allied soldiers dedicated to the liberation of Italy. But the plot is overly packed with storylines both melodramatic and sentimental. Further, Gayle’s writing is unimaginatively cloying. After Frank witnesses a young Italian boy orphaned by the Nazis, he devotes himself to their defeat in these stale terms: “And in that moment, his sorrow turned to resolve. He’d always known this war was important—that the scourge of Nazism had to be defeated. But now it was personal.”

An intriguing and earnest but lachrymose war tale.