My Favorite Read of December 2022: The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner

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“Sometimes what you want is given to you in a way that is so very different from how you had pictured getting it.”

— Susan Meissner, The Last Year of the War

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Goodreads Synopsis

Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943–aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity.

The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences.

My Thoughts

I should be tired of WWII dual-timeline stories by now. But, I love Susan Meissner’s writing, so I couldn’t resist this one. I think the reason these stories keep drawing me in is that there are so many different perspectives to view the war. I had never read anything about German Americans being put in internment camps or sent back to Germany. This really brought home how average families were affected by war.

What I liked about this book

• The friendship between Elisa and Mariko and how the bond remained even after decades of separation.
• I learned more about American Internment camps
• The bulk of the story took place after the war, and focuses on healing