Book Reviews
Following the huge critical and commercial success of his nonfiction memoir, The Color of Water, McBride offers a powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy around the village of St. Anna of Stazzema in December 1944. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind; it is also a carefully crafted tale of a mute Italian orphan boy who teaches the American soldiers, Italian villagers and partisans that miracles are the result of faith and trust. Toward the end of 1944, four black U.S. Army soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in the village as winter and the German army close in. Pvt. Sam Train, a huge, dim-witted, gentle soldier, cares for the traumatized orphan boy and carries a prized statue's head in a sack on his belt. Train and his three comrades are scared and uncertain what to do next, but an Italian partisan named Peppi involves the Americans in a ruthless ploy to uncover a traitor among the villagers. Someone has betrayed the villagers and local partisans to the Germans, resulting in an unspeakable reprisal. Revenge drives Peppi, but survival drives the Americans. The boy, meanwhile, knows the truth of the atrocity and the identity of the traitor, but he clings to Train for comfort and protection. Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.
Publishers Weekly
Having conquered nonfiction with The Color of Water, which dwelled on the New York Times best sellers list for two years, journalist McBride takes a chance at fiction. He roots his novel in actual events, relating an encounter between the 92nd Division's Buffalo Soldiers and a little boy from a Tuscan village where a terrible massacre has occurred.
Library Journal
Although McBride touches on issues of race, atrocity, and evil, these diverse characters are able to transcend such human failings through love and faith. —Margaret Flanaga.
Booklist
McBride's careful treatment of the differences among his black characters and his measured understanding of the unsuspected perils of cross-cultural contact make the end of the book especially surprising. Schooled in hard lessons by the novel, readers may find its last pages anomalous and disappointing.
Stephanie Foote - Book Magazine
Italy, 1944. Credulous giant Sam Train, a rural Southern negro in the embattled 92nd Division of the US Army - strung out along the Cinquale Canal and ranged against Kesselring's 148th Brigade Division - is persuaded by smooth faux-preacher Bishop to rescue a young Italian child caught in the middle of a firestorm. Miraculously unharmed and convinced that God has made him invisible, Train disappears with the boy into the slopes of the Apuane Alps, reluctantly pursued by three members of his unit, and into an actual occurrence in the war: the massacre by German SS of the inhabitants of Sant'Anna Di Stazzema. This novel vibrates with tenderness and sorrow. Its prose is simple and often beautiful, told in an American vernacular which at its height attains the feel and quality of Ralph Ellison, and at its lowest ebb - infrequently, and all the more startling for its exception - a contrived Hollywood ring. It is a book which defies pigeonholing, ranging from unnecessary sentimentality to the absolutely startling - '... the man who was chocolate, the chocolate giant who wept tears of soda pop and made it his birthday just by turning his head'. This is writing which falls in places, but which carries itself, heedless of its own imperfections, with the energy and beauty of a song. Love, faith, brotherhood and equality ripple in the words: McBride, with fervour reminiscent of James Baldwin, constructs a narrative of humanity, struggling to create meaning from the vast forces of history.
Kirkus Reviews (UK)