Lilia: A Tale of Love, Bravery, and Endurance in the Face of Conflict

Kindle Customer: My hearts ached for Lilia as a child who lost so many loved ones, Arturo and Erminio and Eliseo, never really knowing her sisters who where sent away to work as maids to make money for the family. It was a life of hardship for a young child/young woman. But a feeling of love for family shines through these pages.

United States on Oct 08, 2023

loretta bennett: Nothing to dislike as the book fully details the young and difficult life of a young child and her family in the most difficult of situations of survival and trauma, grief and at times fear of what can and does happen in times of war. The story so well told also shows us how a child can overcome her troubles amidst continuing to aid her family. Beautiful non fiction

Canada on Oct 06, 2023

Cary Yurkiw: Lilia is a captivating and poignant book about an Italian girl living in Italy during the Second World War. The author, Linda Ganzini, based the book on the authentic experiences of her mother, Lilia, and her family. The book is well-written, and it captures Lilia's voice, emotions, and thoughts as she faces the horrors and hardships of the war.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, mainly based on actual events and people. This book will make you cry, smile, and think. This book will stay with you long after you finish reading it. It is a book that deserves 5 stars!

Canada on Oct 04, 2023

Lee: Incredibly when I opened this book to read it, it was not only upside down, it was the end of the book! So so I thought how annoying, but I'll just flip it upside down and then I can read it. NOT!!!! I still cannot believe it but the pages, although their numbered correctly, they are in the wrong order!! So no matter how I try to figure it out, they were too mixed up to even read the story! How is that even possible!!!??? I have bought a book here before where it had to be read upside down, but never, ever with the pages all in the wrong order and all mixed up !!!!! Thankfully, Amazon saved me the trouble of having to return the book and just shipped me out another. What are the chances of this happening again????? Hopefully not very good because I'm looking forward to reading it when it arrives!
UPDATE- I did get the second book, and luckily it was readable! This is an incredible story of an incredible young woman and her family. It is just as heartbreaking as it is heartwarming. It is so good, and so important to keep their stories alive. And this author was able to get this amazing tale on paper straight from her own mother, which is truly amazing! By reading the stories of...

Canada on Jul 14, 2023

Deborah Dziewiatkowski: Thank you for sharing the horror of what your mother and her family went through during the war. My heart aches for the life she had to live. Yet she was such a strong willed little girl who turned out to find her Prince Charming. So looking forward to your next book!

United States on Jun 11, 2023

Linda L. OliphantLinda L. Oliphant: Lilia is a family affair in that the author is also the daughter of the main character, Lila. Linda Ganzini probably grew up with these stories, snippets and pieces of her mother’s childhood to young adult throughout her own childhood. These are stories of love, courage, fear, sadness, joy and survival of one family in the rumbling and foreboding shadows of WWII in a small Italian village. The story begins in Italy in 1939. It’s told through the many eyes of the Meneguzzi family giving us much insight into the day to day routines. As the rumbles of war grow louder so does the uncertainty and fear.

Young Lilia’s story is stirring and heart wrenching at the same time. She is a child herself taking care of younger siblings. Life is harsh but there is still much joy in the simple everyday things. Her mother is the rock of the family. She is strict, boarding on bitter as she also gave up her childhood. Lila’s father is the balance for the family; providing the core strength and unconditional love that binds them all together.

Lila’s story reads like a memoir….stories told to her daughter many times over the years. It is obvious that events have been tediously...

United States on Oct 15, 2022

A Gothic Writer's reading nookA Gothic Writer's reading nook: From the opening chapter, Lilia had gripped my heart.

Lilia is the fictionalised memoir of Lilia and her family through Nazi occupation in Northern Italy, during WWII. Made more personal by the fact that Lilia is the author's mother, a point that keeps this story grounded in a very real way. (And on a personal note too, as Lilia and my own father were around the same age. Although my father was here in England, an evacuee ripped from his family, I have Italian roots and to know I had family who suffered the same was hard to swallow whilst reading this.)

We first meet Lilia in all her personal strife and hardship at the age of four, a small child with the heavy burden of daily chores and care of her younger brothers. We are pulled into a fierce embrace as we travel through the story of her family, predominantly told through the eyes of this child. There are tears, tragedy, hardship and pain, but there is also laughter and intense love that holds this all together. This is a story of everyday, normal, people just like you and me who face unimaginable horrors of war.

I won't give anything of the story away, knowing the setting and era of the story is enough to...

United Kingdom on Aug 23, 2021

Sherry L. Ross: This is a book that had to be written, was meant to be written and that should be read by everyone. It is a heart wrenching true story of a young girl growing up in Italy under Mussolini’s reign and Hitler’s occupation and it shows you and makes you feel what she and her family endured. It is written with a deep and compelling understanding of Lilia’s and her family’s suffering, and that is no surprise because it is written by Lilia’s own daughter, Linda Ganzini. And what a superb writer Ms. Ganzini is. So when I say this was a story meant to be told, I mean so on every level.

This telling will be a voice for generations to come in showing us what the innocent of Italy endured, often being sent to Nazi concentration camps, suffering in fear during the occupation of their cities and villages, the endless loss of loved ones, deprivations, food shortages and starvation, bombings and a life of fear and hopelessness. My father was stationed in Italy the last 16 months of the war, as a 23-24-year-old American soldier. He would tell me of the suffering he saw on the faces of the people he met in villages across the country, that it was nothing he would ever forget. It...

United States on Jul 10, 2021

Skeptic: A very moving book. The author clearly put a lot of care into writing this sweeping, cinematic saga of a family living in a time of war. Reader beware: this is a tough book for a person of any age to contend with because there is so much pain in the protagonist’s young life. Lilia is full of brutality. These stories of WWII are important to know.

There are whole sections where it felt like the cruelty would never stop. However, there also are chapters with joy and laughter, and those are a welcome relief. The author’s descriptions are particularly colorful and almost jump off the page.

Lilia gives a glimpse of what one young woman’s life was like living in poverty during WWII. The story's unique perspective shows the harsh realities of what a woman’s opportunities used to be (“limited” is an overstatement). It erases any romantic notion of the domestic life of poor women whose only hope for a better life is to be swept away by a prince.

Lilia makes the senselessness of war personal. I felt like I was a member of this family. It was tough to become attached to characters and then see them suffer and/or die. But stick with Lilia because there is a...

United States on Jun 22, 2021

Adrian G: If you do a Google search of how many Italians were sent to German concentration camps during the last years of WW2, you won’t find much information. Even me, someone accustomed to the foibles of Boolean algorithms, and with a strong background in the history of the Second World War, I can’t find any sort of reliable number.
Now, I’m not even talking about military internees, demobilised Italian soldiers. Nor am I talking about the 6 million souls targeted by Hitler and annihilated in the Shoah. Same goes for the resistance, the partigiani.
Not that those stories aren’t tragic. They are. And yet, there remain largely untold the stories of many thousands more civilians who were snatched up by the Nazis after Italy capitulated, simply for the crime of being Italian.
I’m talking about the everyday Italians. Rosa from the trattoria. Pasquale from the dairy. Maria who owned the flower stall. Beatrice the seamstress. Giovanni the taxi-driver.
Those people could be us. Your neighbour. Your friend. Your cousin. Your lover. Your brother. Snatched for no good reason, never to be seen again.
This book, this wonderful book by Linda Ganzini about her mother’s...

Canada on Jun 22, 2021