This Most Amazing - Jenny Benjamin

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Résumé :
This Most Amazing - multigenerational love stories that span two continents and two centuries. Join the quest for answers: can passionate lives from the past resurface in ones in present day?

In 1797, in the mountains of Italy, Vincenzo Lupo deserts Napoleon Bonaparte's army after he kills an Austrian boy during battle. Plagued with night terrors and guilt, he crosses the Apennine Mountains to reach his village, Villetta Barrea.

In 2012, Italian-American Dahlia Conti teaches poetry in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States. While leading a workshop on found poetry, she meets artist Jonas Nickle, and a passionate romance begins even though Dahlia is reluctant to be consumed by a relationship because she is about to embark on a new teaching job in Rome.

When Dahlia reaches Italy, she continues a long-distance relationship with Jonas, and while taking in the sights, smells, and tastes of Italy, something shifts in Dahlia's body and mind. Not only has she traveled to a new country, when she sleeps, she travels to a different time where she re-lives scenes from Vincenzo's life.

Drawing together two time periods along the same Italian landscape, these stories collide during Dahlia's dreams. Experiencing what she believes are auditory and visual memories where she embodies Vincenzo, or his lover, Ottavia, Dahlia searches for answers to the mysteries of Vincenzo's life: what happened after his fellow villagers put him in jail for desertion? Here he fell in love with the doctor's daughter, Ottavia, who supplied Vincenzo with meals. Were they able to fulfill their romance outside the jail cell?

Dahlia pulls her own lover along in this search, answering the past with new life. In This Most Amazing, a historical romance reaches a modern female artist, and in this curious mix, creation means redemption.

Biographie:
Jenny Benjamin is an Italian American who, for many years, listened to the family story about her great-great grandfather who deserted Napoleon's army in Italy in 1797. After years of writing poems about an Italian soldier who met his wife when she brought him food in the village jail, she got the idea to connect the soldier's story with a woman in 2012/2013. This Most Amazing is that story. Over thirty of Jenny Benjamin's poems have been published in journals and magazines. She is a freelance writer and teacher in the Midwest in the United States. She has completed a young adult, science-fiction trilogy about seventeen-year-old, African-American Jesse Woods who finds he has superhuman powers that were given to him from an ancient alien species pretending to be humanity's gods since the advent of human religions. She is currently working on another novel for adults about a forty-two-year-old widow re-learning how to live after caring for her brain-injured husband for three years. Embarking on a new writing retreat in Scotland, the protagonist finds mysterious happenings in her Scottish Highland cottage, which may include new love.

Melissa Schoeffel (author of Maternal Conditions: Reading Kingsolver, Castillo, Erdrich, and Ozeki) on this enticing time travel historical romance: Reminiscent of Tracy Chevalier's The Virgin Blue [...] Benjamin's prose is evocative, her characters finely drawn, and the worlds she creates for us give us new ways to think about our own. Angela Sorby (author of Distance Learning, Bird Skin Coat, and The Sleeve Waves, University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) on this work of contemporary AND historical literary fiction: Readers will be absorbed in the story, but they will also be intrigued by its central question: how does the past endure, not just in history but in our own bodies?