Adriana Trigiani

"From present day Viareggio to Glasgow during World War II, a multigenerational sweeping tale of love lost, family secrets, and reconciliation over decades from New York Times bestselling author Adriana Trigiani"--

A Novel

The Good Left Undone

Kristen Claiborn

After finishing this book, I realize that I really haven’t read many stories out of Italy from World War II. Most of the more popular books are about England, France, and Germany. I certainly feel like I had to have read at least one other based in and around Italy, but I can’t remember any. It makes me wonder why. Is it because Italy was allied with Germany? Maybe because Mussolini was truly a fascist and Italy would prefer to brush that entire period under the rug? Is it simply because Italy lost and they’d rather not talk about it? There were many things included in this book that I was unaware of and found quite interesting, enough to make me want to do a little more reading. 
	The one word I can use to describe this book is boring. I found it to be incredibly bland. This book should have taken me one, maybe two days to finish, but I struggled to get it done in five days. I found the descriptive paragraphs to be tedious and unnecessary, dragging on to the point my eyes would get blurry. What could have been a compelling story turned into an excessively wordy lesson on what to avoid when trying to maintain an engaged reader. I have never been a fan of alternating timelines, and this one took it to an extreme, going back and forth inside chapters rather than every other chapter. By the end, I was overwhelmed and slightly confused. 
	I found the sheer number of characters overwhelming as well. The author added new characters so often, it became difficult to determine who was a major player and who just had a bit part. Reading about Domenica’s journey, new people were added so often, it became difficult to keep up. I wondered whether I should invest my emotional energy on this new character, or to just disregard them completely. By the end, I really just didn’t care about any of them, it was just too much. And the story about the elephant didn’t make a lot of sense either. It felt like the author put a bunch of characters, storylines, and random plot points into a jar, shook the jar, dumped all the components out and wrote the story based on where everything fell. 
	Now that I’ve been harsh, I will say the story was compelling enough to make me want to get to the end. I wish the author had just stuck with Domenica’s story, because that was the good stuff that kept the book going. Keep in mind, this is just my opinion. Read the book.

The Good Left Undone A Novel

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