on
3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4/5
Pages: 480
Summary:
Inger has spent her life being lectured on how to be a perfect Nazi girl. When she finds herself responsible for both the safety of her best friend Annemarie, and her own life, after Nazi Germany is defeated at the end of World War II, Inger must come to terms with some hard truths.
A year later, Eva has arrived in America, her non-speaking sister Brigit in tow. Although Eva is determined to set up a new and good life for herself and her sister, that isn't her only goal in America. She is also on the hunt for a notorious Nazi, pressured to speed by both her own morals and the looming presence of the American agents to whom she promised information in exchange for freedom. Yet although Eva is convinced she knows exactly who she's looking for, she slowly comes to understand more about the Nazi party's crimes--and about her own family.
Thoughts:
I usually don't like to read historical fiction--I find that characters and plots quickly become buried in historical events, which makes them quite boring. Although I wouldn't say this book was an exception to the trapped-by-historical-accuracy phenomenon, I did really like reading it. It was heavy enough that it seemed to pay adequate homage to the horrors of WWII, without losing the hope and naïveté characteristic of YA novels. The writing was interesting, the foreshadowing perfect for a YA audience, and it was definitely fun to read this as a non-young-adult and be able to see through the foreshadowing from the start. The mystery and the way the two stories converged was satisfying, and I wasn't bored anywhere in the story, although in my opinion it could have been shortened a bit. I thought that Brigit was the most interesting character for several reasons: her beauty (if she wasn't clearly conventionally attractive, I'm curious how her reception as a non-speaking disabled person would have been), her identity (Eva's assumption that she was the object of the experiment was so blatant it was fascinating) and her end (both from the perspective of her unrepentant and unrepent-able Nazism, and her full recovery from her disability). I rarely say this, but I would be curious to read another book about her.
Overall, although this book wasn't necessarily my cup of tea, I am glad that I've read it.