Title: One Breath
Author: Gene Needham
Publisher: ‎‎ iUniverse
ISBN: 978-1663221292
Pages: 334
Genre: Adult Fiction / Historical Romance
Reviewed by: Michaela Gordon

Read Book Review

One Breath by Gene Needham is a 1950s story of two young people deeply in love. Maria Papei is an independent young Italian woman who is in love with an American, but she has been promised to another in an arranged marriage made in the best interests of her family’s business. Maria and her lover, Phillip, are desperate to be together, but a union between them would create major problems. Maria and Phillip must fight for their love and go through ups-and-downs with an Italian flair. One Breath is a theatrical tale about true love and family, with strong ties that cannot be severed.

One Breath has a strong Italian theme. It even has occasional sentences written in Italian and contains vivid descriptions of delicious Italian dishes. It is predominantly a romance novel, but it has elements of adventure, fighting, grief, and drama. It also contains some explicit love-making scenes. It is theatrical in both the story content and how the story is told. It is very easy to imagine it becoming an intriguing play or film.

The sections and chapters alternate between Phillip’s and Maria’s points of view. Maria has a big Italian family, so there are quite a few characters, and close attention is needed to keep track of them all. Maria’s background gives her strong character development. The writing also sometimes shifts focus, writing in the present, and at other times it’s like a retelling of something that happened. The thing that I appreciated most about Gene Needham’s writing is that Gene took the time to include a funeral scene for a couple of the side characters. When a reader can really experience the death and mourning of a character, it actually makes that deceased character feel more real, which creates a deeper emotional connection between the reader and the book. This was very clever; most authors don’t write like this. When a side character who has not played a large role passes away, they are usually overlooked; they died and that’s that, but to write about the funeral is a smart move on Gene Needham’s part.

One Breath by Gene Needham is a great book for those that have affinities for Italian culture, theatrical romances that take you back in time, and heart-warming endings.