Overview

The soldiers came at night. By morning, Cesare's village was gone. Eleven-year-old Cesare Gavassio has lost everything. His home in the mountain valleys of northern Italy has been burned. His father has been taken. Now Cesare hides in a stone shepherd's hut high in the Alps with his grandmother Renata and his six-year-old sister Lucia, surviving on marmot broth and a handful of chestnuts while French soldiers hunt the trails below. Then Lucia finds a wounded man in a gully. A young man in a blue coat. A French soldier. Cesare wants to leave him there to die. But Grandmother carries the soldier inside, tends his wound with her own shawl, and shares their last food with the enemy. Cesare is furious. How can she show mercy to the very people who destroyed them? As the soldier slowly heals under their roof, Cesare is torn between his grandmother's stubborn faith and the fierce call of a boy named Pasquo, who is gathering survivors in the high pastures to fight back. One path demands forgiveness Cesare cannot imagine giving. The other offers the revenge his heart is burning for. But hatred has a cost. And when the soldier does something no one expected, Cesare must face a question harder than any he has known: Can bitterness and mercy grow in the same heart? Set during the brutal persecution of the Waldensian Christians in 1685, Bitter Roots is a story about the slow, costly work of grace in a boy's clenched fist, and the Christ-like love of a grandmother who refused to let hatred have the final word.

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