It took me a little bit to get into The Rebel Girls of Rome (publication day July 8, 2025) by Jordyn Taylor, but once I did, I was hooked. Going back and forth in time in the present-day, from the perspective of Lilah who is visiting Rome with her grandfather Ralph (Raffaele), and in 1943, from the perspective of Bruna, Raffaele’s older sister, who are Jews living in Rome with their family. Ralph refuses to talk about what happened during the war, (he was only 4 or 5 in 1943) and he believes that his entire family was sent to Auschwitz and died.
And Lilah is grieving, too, as her mother recently died from pancreatic cancer, and she had had a complicated relationship with her father, Ralph, probably because of his war trauma. But Lilah and Ralph are in Rome because someone named Tommaso found her on social media because they came into possession of a locket with a note signed by Bruna Mosseri, who they have traced as Ralph’s older sister.
Going back and forth in time, we learn what really happened when the Fascists rounded up the Mosseri family and how both Ralph and Bruna were able to escape being sent to Auschwitz. Bruna joins the Resistance and reunites with her first crush–another girl–and is involved in actions with results that break her heart.
There is romance for people of all ages, and queer characters both in the past and present, and all of the threads were nicely tied up in a bow. One could argue that there are too many coincidences, but I was still enthralled by the story. As I noted earlier, the beginning of the book is a little slow–I thought the first chapter was too much info-dumping, not enough story–but after a couple of chapters the author found her way and I enjoyed it. I also thought it was completely weight-neutral, no mention of body size in a negative way.
Reading While Fat 