The Tuscan Secret by Angela Petch is about a woman named Anna who is trying to cope with her beloved mother Ines's death. The only personal item she inherits is a box of old yellowed paper handwritten in Italian along with a few photos. She is desperate to learn more about her mother and to find a way to keep the connection they shared alive. As she reads the pages, Anna learns her mother’s truth about what happened during the war.
Anna decides that she has nothing keeping her from visiting Italy to be fully immersed in her mother’s past as she recently went through a breakup and lost her job. She travels to a small village of Rofelle, where she decides to enjoy the sights while trying to decipher her mother’s letters.
She learns that her mother lived a happy and quiet life. Ines spent most of her days herding sheeps in the meadows or helping her parents at the mill. Until World War Two began and Nazi soldiers started to encroach on their land, Ines and her family lived quiet lives. After foreign troops entered their land, Ines joined the Resistenza, with her brother to help protect British soldiers and her homeland from the invaders. As Anna delves deeper into her mother’s story, she learns that Ines fell in love with a British soldier. She wonders what caused Ines to leave her beloved country and what happened to that soldier as Anna spent most of her childhood hearing her parents fight with each other. She has a hard time understanding how they ended up together. And Ines refused to talk about her life in Italy no matter how much Anna had asked her.
Anna visits her mother’s old house, in hopes that she can find something that belonged to her mother. She meets an elderly Italian man who seems to know more than he is letting on. He flinches when Anna mentions her mother and stares at the photos with Ines that Anna has shared with him. However, he refused to talk to Anna and claimed he doesn’t remember anything about the war nor does he want to talk about it. Will Anna be able to find out the truth about her family’s past?
The novel was a quick and straightforward read. It did have a few twists but most were predictable. The book was told from alternating narrators and times. I thought both timelines were interesting but I found myself enjoying Ines’s storyline more. I wanted to find out more about her past and how she ended up being in a loveless marriage when it seems that she was happily in love during her youth. I did find the novel to be moving slowly at times and found myself wanting more to happen. If you are a fan of cozy romance novels that take place around World War Two, then you might enjoy this book.
