Unputdownable: Beneath a Scarlett Sky sparks debate

My brother raved about this book to me, and, since he’s not a huge reader, I knew it had to be good. Now, after reading it, recommending it to countless friends, and hearing nothing but positive reviews, I figured it was time to write about everything I’ve gushed over with them. 

Mark Sullivan’s 2017 novel, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, is an emotional whirlwind of a story, as Sullivan recounts the evolution of Pino Lella from an innocent teenager to a World War II hero. 

Though a work of historical fiction, Pino’s character and much of his story are supposedly based on facts. Equipped with research and an interview with Pino himself, Sullivan’s literary genius transports readers to Milan, Italy in 1943.

In the heart of the city, Pino and his family reside in a modest apartment. Nazis are steadily taking over the country, but Pino is focused more on friends, girls and fun than the war. 

With his brother Mimo and his friend Carletto in tow, Pino wanders the city.

 Pino is convinced he’s found the love of his life when he spots Anna Marta, an older woman he almost immediately falls head over heels for. 

The war doesn’t stop for love, however, and when the invasion of Milan begins, Pino’s parents want to send the boys away from the city. 

Mimo is sent to Casa Alpina, a religious camp in the Alps run by an old family friend, Father Re. Pino convinces his parents to let him stay in the city, as he pines after Anna and refuses to acknowledge the severity of the situation. 

However, when his family’s home is destroyed in a bombing, Pino’s priorities are completely altered, and he joins his brother in the Alps. At just seventeen years old, Pino begins working for Father Re’s underground organization to help Jewish people escape from Italy to Switzerland through the Alps. 

My initial reaction to this was admiration, as Pino was willing to risk his life to help complete strangers. This admiration turned into anger at the world, though, as I thought of all the children and young adults who had their adolescence stripped away from them during the war. 

At Casa Alpina, Father Re physically and mentally prepares Pino for his potentially fatal role. Soon enough, the young man leads groups of old and young across the mountains through subzero temperatures and lethal storms. 

Looking death in the face becomes commonplace for the young hero, and I found myself holding my breath as I made my way through these intense chapters. 

Amid the horror, Pino meets innocent people whose heartwarming histories and hopes for some sort of future make his decision to risk his life over and over an easy one. 

During this part of the book, Sullivan intertwines the perils of the natural world with something equally — if not more so — dangerous: human nature. 

With few moments of rest and recuperation in between each group’s journey, Pino musters an unimaginable amount of strength and makes the trek across the Alps countless times. 

None of these journeys are without peril. Sullivan makes this abundantly clear as he vividly depicts the action-packed journeys, keeping me on the edge of my seat with each turn of the page. 

Frost-bitten, exhausted and void of any sort of sympathy for a group that would leave another with the option to flee or die, Pino soon faces his own Hobson’s choice. 

His eighteenth birthday is approaching, and his parents are urging him to join the SS before he is forcibly drafted into the Italian army. If drafted, he would be sent to the front, and his death would be imminent.

As I’m sure you just did, I gasped at the thought of his parents wanting him to join the Nazi party. I understood, however, when Sullivan reveals their parental instincts are right: Pino’s enlisting gives him a better chance at a non-combat — and an inherently safer — position. 

So, albeit begrudgingly, Pino agrees and is soon appointed personal driver of General Leyes. 

My disappointment at the thought of him no longer being able to help innocent people make it to safety was brief, as Pino soon figured out how to use his job on the inside to do good.

Pino’s risks pit him against death daily once again, and his courage at this point in the book seems impenetrable. 

As the story continues to unfold and tragedies strike left and right, Pino’s work as a spy for the Allies proves his mental strength rivals the physical force he displayed in the Alps. 

One of the things that gets Pino through the worst of things is his reunion with Anna, whose reintroduction to the story I welcomed excitedly. 

Without spoiling anything, I’ll warn you that the ending will likely leave you feeling a jumble of emotions. Personally, sadness and anger won out above all else. 

The absence of a completely happy ending made the book feel more realistic, but there is one caveat.

Sullivan markets the book as “based on a true story,” but controversy has arisen over just how true it is. 

Sullivan acknowledges his implementation of speculation and fictional elements with the following statement in a passage at the end of the novel’s preface:  

“Due to the document burning, the collective amnesia, and the death of so many characters by the time I learned of the story, I have been forced in places to construct scenes and dialogue based solely on Pino’s memory decades later, the scant physical evidence that remains, and my imagination fueled by my research and informed suspicions. I have also comingled or compressed events and characters for the sake of narrative coherence and have fully dramatized incidents that were described to me in much more truncated forms.

As a result, then, the story you are about to read is not a work of narrative nonfiction, but a novel of biographical and historical fiction that hews closely to what happened to Pino Lella between June 1943 and May 1945.”

Even with this admission, I read the book as an embellished chronicle of a true Italian war hero. 

Once I put the book back on my shelf, I fell down the rabbit hole of blog articles and Reddit posts about how far Sullivan reached in the telling of Pino’s story. Fans and critics debate (mis)representations of Pino’s story due to a lack of evidence and factual discrepancies between the book and the real world — namely inaccurate geographical descriptions and mistaken identities of historical individuals

To date, I’m not sure what specific facts to believe. But, my distress over the things innocent people had to do to survive this war remains as high as ever.  

I rate this book 4.7/5 stars and recommend it to anyone looking for an emotionally charged, fast-paced novel and/or a look into what WWII was like in Italy.