Dante and Angelina are both very independent individuals, whose brief encounter leads to a letter-writing courtship. Dante is clearly more smitten at the very beginning of the strange romance than the young woman. Her image keeps him going during the tough times in the desert. Angelina's fondness for Dante grows slowly through the letters she receives, not really able to understand why he is interested in her.

Sabatini has researched her tale well, giving us historical details that have mostly been ignored—perhaps deliberately because of the Italian switch to the side of the Allies later in the war—but which are important to help understand the face of fascism. It is also an aid in helping to understand Italian attitudes.

Dante joins the army to escape a domineering father, a minor cog in the Mussolini civil service. He is joined by his close friend Sabino, who is also a mechanic. The latter has enough patience for both friends to keep a light lid on the easily angered Dante, though not enough to keep his friend from ending up in the brig now and then.

While Dante deals with the war in his way, Angelina sees to the daily routine in her little village, where at first the only dark side appears to be an elderly, spiteful neighbor. But, as the young men of her village slowly disappear, even her brothers, some in the war, others into the mountains as partisans, life grows more complicated. On the arrival of German troops, Angelina begins to learn about real fear.

Sabatini writes well, drawing the reader into the story of these two young people, innocents in a way, and into the landscape of the two very different locations they inhabit physically. Yet, because the novelist employs the method of alternate voices, the reader soon becomes irritated because chapters are often too short and one is barely into the one story before being placed into another. Only when Dante's and Angelina's lives finally intersect, does the irritation fade, though not completely vanish. This approach just somehow fails in this novel. And being a stickler for detail, another thing that bothers this reviewer, is the use of the word jeep for the German Kübelwagen, or commonly known as Kürbis (pumpkin) for its awkward shape. The jeep and the Kürbis had little in common though both served similar purposes. The other thing is something an editor should have caught. Angelina watches a hummingbird in her garden. Sorry, contrary to European misconceptions, hummingbirds do not exist outside the Western hemisphere—North & South America. What Angelina might have seen is a Hummingbird Hawk-moth, which has a long proboscis that looks like a long beak, and it rapidly flaps its colorful wings similar to a hummingbird's though this moth cannot fly backwards.

The book also disappoints in that it reveals very little about the dark side of the Italian partisans—there were several politically opposed groups that attacked the Germans, but also civilians, whose politics did not match their own. Sabatini brings about a happy ending in a fashion that places the two lovers in a cocoon, completely devoid of the political implications around them. It's just a little too clean of an ending that tells us little of what happens after Mussolini's death and the fight of who will lead Italy at war's end. Nor does she transmit the hardship many Italians faced as war continued for the Allies after Italy changed sides with the capture of Mussolini.