When I was studying at U.C. Davis in the late 1970s-early 1980s, one of my absolute favorite classes was an English Lit class that met twice a week: on Tuesdays we would discuss a book, and on Thursdays we would either have the author of that book as a guest speaker or we would go on a field trip related to the author/book (Jack London’s Wolf House in Glen Ellen, CA was my favorite Thursday class that quarter!). One of the authors who came to speak with us was Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, whose book Farewell to Manzanar (co-written with her husband, James Houston) tells the story of her family being sent to the Manzanar “War Relocation Center” (concentration camp) in in the high desert east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California when she was seven years old. That book and her story have stayed with me for 40 years (and even prompted a weekend drive to see Manzanar), so when I had an offer of Susan Meissner’s book The Last Year of the War, which also deals with a girl whose family is sent to a camp during WWII, I was eager to receive it in exchange for my honest review.
In Ms. Meissner’s fictional book, the girl
whose story is told is Elise Sontag, a German-American teenager living in Iowa
during World War II. Although her parents have been in the U.S. for some twenty
years, they are not legal citizens. So when her father is arrested and charged
with being a Nazi sympathizer, the family is interned at a government camp in
Crystal City, Texas.
Elise becomes friends with Mariko Inoue, a
Japanese-American girl from California, and together they dream of living in
New York City some day. When Elise’s family is sent to back to Germany in a
prisoner exchange, their friendship is broken, but Elise never forgets the
close friend who helped her during a difficult time. As the book
begins, Elise is an older woman dealing with
what seems like early signs of dementia, but she is determined to make one last
effort to rekindle their friendship.
As was true with Jeanne Houston’s book, The Last Year of the War relates the feelings of loss and displacement well. It was heartbreaking to see what happened to so many German, Japanese and Italian families, all of whom were uprooted from their homes. Elise’s family had it even worse, as they were sent back to Germany in the middle of the war as part of a prisoner exchange. Elise has only ever known the feeling of being someone born in America, and she suffers a loss of self, as she feels she doesn’t really belong there (even though she was with family). Another reason it was affecting was the parallel to the thousands of children being detained and held in cages due to immigration issues in 2019.
Ms. Meissner does her usual job of presenting well-developed characters with feelings and problems that may not parallel those of the reader, but that are still relatable. I didn’t feel the emotions between the individual characters as strongly in this book as in Manzanar (or Snow Falling on Cedars, another book dealing with this topic), but I enjoyed the experience of reading it. Wished there had been a bit more about what happened to Mariko and her family, but perhaps that would have made it just too much (?). Four stars, with thanks to Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley.