Review of The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller

World War II books that don’t focus on soldiers or battles are my jam. Give me the pieces about the civilians, the spies, the scientists, the kids. I picked up The Curse of Pietro Houdini on a whim from the new books shelf at my library. I thought the title betokened some kind of fantasy novel, and though that hope was dashed, I still enjoyed Derek B. Miller’s historical yarn of an irreverent-yet-sentimental old man and his happenstance, gendershifting protégé.

A fourteen-year-old narrowly escapes Rome as Italy finds itself occupied by German forces. The eponymous Pietro scoops up this child on his way to Montecassino, the first Benedictine abbey, where he plans to restore and perhaps rescue some priceless works of art before the Nazis or the Allies destroy them. The child claims the name Massimo and takes on the appearance of a boy and falls in with Pietro as his assistant. From here the kind of peculiar bond really only found in quirky stories like this develops as Pietro tries to keep Massimo safe while also preserving the artworks. Along the way, they kill some Nazis, get injured, go on the run, and more.

Miller shows himself an expert at interweaving fact and fiction in this historical novel. I didn’t know much about Monte Cassino (don’t know much about wartime Italy at all, to be honest), so it was fascinating learning about real-life people like Schlengel and Becker alongside Miller’s fictional creations like Pietro. I liked seeing things through the eyes of sympathetic yet non-Ally characters: their disdain for Americans and imperialists is enjoyable. Pietro criticizes the Americans, for example, for dispatching their “monuments men” in some cases yet blithely bombing irreplaceable landmarks like Montecassino in other cases. Similarly, the perspectives of civilians like Lucia and Dino, or Bella, or even Massimo/Eva, shed light on how fraught the war must have felt when it was both in the vicinity yet at a remove.

Miller’s exploration of gender expression through our narrator is also worth examining. The book starts in the first person until the narrator reaches a breaking point and “becomes” Massimo, fully inhabiting this persona so much that it feels like he “believes” himself to be a fourteen-year-old boy from a rough life in Rome. At this point, the book shifts into third person, remaining this way even as Massimo transforms into Eva to escape press-ganging. Though I don’t believe we are meant to interpret these shifts as the narrator truly having a mental break, they are useful in illustrating how intensely some people had to conceal their identities to survive Nazi or fascist rule. I also enjoyed how accepting Pietro was of the genderfluidity of our narrator.

Without going into spoilers, I want to conclude by briefly looking at this book as a tragedy—for it has some of those elements. Dark shit happens near the end of this book. You want everyone to get out of it alive. You want a happy ending. And maybe Miller gives you one or maybe he doesn’t—that isn’t for me to say. But like any book about World War II, The Curse of Pietro Houdini is about resilience in the face of trauma, and Miller is quick to point out in his afterword that some of the worst events in this book did, in fact, happen. War is hell, and it is no wonder novelists continue to revisit some of our most famous wars so they can tinker with the environments that most test our humanity.

If, like me, you want “cozy” wartime books, The Curse of Pietro Houdini has something to offer. It’s humorous yet sometimes heavy, far-reaching yet incredibly intimate, lighthearted yet shading often into sombre. In other words, it is as much a rash of contradictions as its title character—as it should be.