The Rebel Girls of Rome Offers Swoony LGBTQ+ Romance and Gripping Historical Drama — Read an Excerpt! (Exclusive)

Historical fiction fans: Your new obsession is here!

The Rebel Girls of Rome by Jordyn Taylor is part sweeping romance, part dual-timeline historical fiction, and absolutely dreamy. It’s a standalone companion to her breakout debut The Paper Girl of Paris, with the same page-turning excitement and richly drawn characters you can’t help but adore.

The new book follows Lilah, a grieving college student who wants to sleuth out her Holocaust survivor grandfather’s mysterious past, and Bruna, a queer Jewish woman who joins the resistance during World War II. After Lilah gets an intriguing letter from a fellow student named Tommaso, she and her grandfather travel to Rome — where she may find more than the answers she’s looking for.

As for Bruna, she’s devastated after her family is taken away to the camps, so she joins the resistance movement to try and quell her guilt. There, she reconnects with her childhood crush Elsa and has to decide exactly what kinds of risks she’s willing to take.

Intrigued yet? Read on for an exclusive excerpt from The Rebel Girls of Rome.

While Grandpa scans the menu, I scan the street for the guy who’s going to change our lives. It would help if I knew exactly what he looked like, but all I’ve seen is his tiny Gmail photo. Every dark mop of curls sends my heart thudding into my rib cage. I tap my phone to check the time — again. It’s still five minutes before two, but I didn’t want to be late for the reason Grandpa and I flew halfway around the world. 

“Pronto?” 

I drag my eyes off the strangers traipsing along the cobblestones. The waiter’s here to take our order. With an apologetic smile, I gesture to one of the empty seats across from us. “Stiamo aspettando il nostro amico.” We’re waiting for our friend. 

“Qualcosa da bere mentre aspetti?” he asks. 

I turn to Grandpa. “Do you want something to drink while we wait?” Since we touched down in Rome yesterday morning, he’s been letting me do all the talking: to the cab driver, to the woman who owns the apartment we’re renting, to the staff in every restaurant and café. I’m not sure whether it’s that he can’t speak the language anymore, or he just doesn’t want to — and I’m too afraid of upsetting him to ask. All I know is I’m grateful that Mom spoke so much Italian to me growing up, and that I took it these first two semesters of college. 

“Tell him I’ll take a cappuccino,” Grandpa mumbles. 

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Wincing, I ask if cappuccinos are still available, knowing full well we’ve just committed a major faux pas. Italians don’t drink milk in their coffee after eleven o’clock in the morning. 

Sure enough, the waiter shakes his head. “Non nel pomeriggio.” Not in the afternoon. 

“That’s fine,” Grandpa mutters to me. “I’ll have an espresso.” Interesting that he didn’t wait for me to translate. 

I smile up at the waiter. “Un caffè espresso per mio nonno, per favore.” An espresso for my grandfather, please. 

He nods and heads inside, leaving Grandpa and me to continue our waiting game. Grandpa crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair. He lets out a sigh that ruffles his bushy gray mustache — a sigh that seems to contain a lifetime of sorrow. 

I go back to scanning the street for Tommaso, praying I haven’t dragged us into some kind of wild-goose chase. What if this whole thing is a scam? Scams are pretty sophisticated these days. Maybe Tommaso is a con artist who makes a living by posing as an innocent university student, telling naive Americans he’s found some long-lost family heirloom, and luring them to Rome so he can rob them. It seems like a lot of work, though, when you could just rob someone local. Not that I condone robbing anyone, from near or far.

Oh god, I’m anxiety spiraling. I sweep my long, coppery hair into a ponytail so I have something to do with my hands; it feels good to get it off the back of my neck, which is damp with sweat in the June heat. I’m not really worried Tommaso is going to rob us. I’m just scared that if anything goes wrong, Grandpa’s going to freak out and fly home. 

It’s a miracle he’s here to begin with. Grandpa was born in Rome, but you’d never know it from meeting him. Whenever the topic of his childhood comes up, or even something random about the war, his face goes slack and a mist seems to pass over his eyes. It’s like he temporarily checks out of consciousness.  

The one and only time I asked him how he survived — I was in tenth grade, and working on a family-history project — Grandpa got up from his armchair and shuffled into the kitchen, muttering about needing a drink. (“Could’ve told you that would happen,” Mom said, almost smugly.) Grandpa goes by Ralph — not his birth name, Raffaele, which I glimpsed on his boarding pass at the airport — and I’ve never heard him utter a word of his first language. In his defense, he was only six when he came to America to live with cousins after the war, but clearly there’s more to his rejection of all things Italian than having spent most of his life stateside. 

For most of my life, Mom claimed she’d long ago given up on trying to learn what happened in Grandpa’s past, but that wasn’t true. Deep down, she’d never really moved on. In my senior year of high school, when the tests came back and the doctor said she had three months to live, Mom started asking Grandpa questions again. No matter how much she begged for the truth, Grandpa said she should focus on getting better, not “things that happened a lifetime ago.” 

But Mom didn’t get better, and she died without answers — died without ever understanding why her father had always been so closed off, even to his own family. 

Between the scraps of evidence Mom was able to gather and my own exhaustive research on Rome’s Jewish population during World War II, I know a few concrete things about Grandpa’s childhood. He was born in September 1938, the year Italy introduced “racial laws” banning Jews from going to school, working certain jobs and marrying people of other faiths. The war started the following year, with Italy eventually joining in 1940 — on Hitler’s side.

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Grandpa was five in September 1943, when Italy abandoned its alliance with Germany to join the Allied Powers instead, and Germany responded by occupying Rome. On Oct. 16 of that year, Grandpa’s mother, father, and two sisters were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, along with over a thousand other Roman Jews. Only 16 of those deported survived. 

I still don’t know how Grandpa got away, or where he went instead, but he was the only member of his immediate family to escape the roundup — or so we thought. 

Everything changed early one Saturday morning this past April. I was at my favorite desk on the second floor of the college library, making headway on my final paper for my Modern European History class, when an email whooshed into my inbox from a name I’d never seen before: Tommaso Reni. I was planning on ignoring it, as I was in the middle of typing 8,000 words on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but then I noticed the subject line: “Question about Bruna Mosseri.” 

Bruna Mosseri was the older of Grandpa’s two sisters. Besides the fact that she’d died in the Holocaust, I didn’t know anything about her. Leaning in closer to my laptop screen, I opened the email. 

Dear Lilah, 

I apologize for the strange message. My name is Tommaso Reni, and I am a university student in Rome, Italy. My great-grandmother, Violetta Pellegrini, died in Rome in 1944, during World War II. I have always wanted to know more about her, but I have never succeeded in finding any information. 

I’m writing to you because you might be able to help me. While cleaning out the apartment of my grandmother (Violetta’s daughter, Carla), I found a locket. Inside the locket, there was a note that mentioned Violetta’s death. It was written by someone named Bruna Mosseri. Searching online, I found the article you wrote for the Hamilton Spectator about Holocaust Remembrance Day, where you mention a great-aunt from Rome named  Bruna Mosseri. I am wondering: Is it possible your great aunt wrote the note I found in the locket? 

Any information you have would be very helpful! Photos are attached. 

Ciao, 

Tommaso 

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My arms were covered in goose bumps by the time I finished reading the email. This past summer, before my freshman year of college — or as I always think of it, my Summer of Darkness, when my world was shattered but I was trying to hold it together for Dad and my two little brothers, and there was no more school to distract me from just how painful this was — I’d made myself a promise: I would do whatever I could to get those answers about Grandpa. It was partly for Mom, because of how badly she’d wanted to know, but there was also more to it than that. Losing Mom had been a brutal reminder that life was fleeting. Who knew how much time Grandpa — or any of us — had left?

If — when — Grandpa died, the truth about our family would die with him. Mom’s death had left a violent gash in the fabric of our family, but maybe it was still possible to stitch up the other holes.  

And maybe I could be the one to do it. 

The Rebel Girls of Rome Copyright © 2025 by Jordyn Taylor. Used with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Rebel Girls of Rome comes out July 8 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.