From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and As
Bright as Heaven comes a novel about a German American teenager whose
life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment
camp during World War II.
In 1943, Elise Sontag is a typical American teenager from Iowa--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.
But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind
enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head-on the person the war
desires to make of her. In that devastating crucible she must discover
if she has the will to rise above prejudice and hatred and re-claim her
own destiny, or disappear into the image others have cast upon her.
The Last Year of the War tells a little-known story of World War II
with great resonance for our own times and challenges the very notion of
who we are when who we've always been is called into question.
