Darth Pedant

Full disclosure: I won an ARC in a Goodreads giveaway I don’t remember entering. I mean, I must have entered it. It’s right there on the list of giveaways I’ve entered. I had to have clicked on the giveaway and gone through several confirmation steps. It’s not something one can do by accident. The only explanation I can come up with is that I was super fibro-fogged that night and brainlessly entered a bunch of giveaways for books I wouldn’t normally be interested in.

You see, I don’t generally care for memoirs. I prefer biographies. Linear, non-rambly biographies. And if I’d been in a non-fogged state, I would have steered clear of the memoir of a catastrophically injured plane crash survivor. (I am very uncomfortable with the whole inspiration porn thing. Not that this is inspiration porn, but I wouldn’t have taken the chance.)

But since the book showed up on my doorstep and the genealogy aspect did sound interesting, I decided to give it a shot. And I did enjoy the parts about the author exploring her family history, though I found the book as a whole to be a bit repetitive and disjointed in a stream-of-consciousness, memoirish way that would be perfectly fine if I liked memoirs.

My biography preference aside, this was well-written and I learned a lot of things about Italian soldiers in WWII that my teachers never covered in history class.