#BookReview The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner @SusanMeissner @BerkleyPub @FreshFiction

The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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Elise Sontag's life changes drastically in 1943 is sent, together with her family to an internment camp in Texas. Her father, who has been a legal US citizen for almost twenty years, is accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. Elise meets Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American girl at the camp and they form a close bond, despite that not all people around them approve.

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#BookReview A Bridge Across the Ocean by Susan Meissner @SusanMeissner @BerkleyPub @FreshFiction

A Bridge Across the Ocean by Susan Meissner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Wartime intrigue spans the lives of three women past and present in the latest novel from the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life .

February, 1946. World War Two is over, but the recovery from the most intimate of its horrors has only just begun for Annaliese Lange, a German ballerina desperate to escape her past, and Simone Deveraux, the wronged daughter of a French Resistancespy.

Now the two women are joining hundreds of other European war brides aboard the renowned RMS Queen Mary to cross the Atlantic and be reunited with their American husbands. Their new lives in the United States brightly beckon until their tightly-held secrets are laid bare in their shared stateroom. When the voyage ends at New York Harbor, only one of them will disembark...

Present day. Facing a crossroads in her own life, Brette Caslake visits the famously haunted Queen Mary at the request of an old friend. What she finds will set her on a course to solve a seventy-year-old tragedy that will draw her into the heartaches and triumphs of the courageous war brides and will ultimately lead her to reconsider what she has to sacrifice to achieve her own deepest longings.

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A BRIDGE ACROSS THE OCEAN by Susan Meissner is a wartime mystery novel about two women who have both gone through much during the war and are going to America on RMS Queen Mary as war brides. Simone Deveraux lost her father and brother who both got shot for being part of the Resistance. She had to stay hidden for fear of the Gestapo who is after her. Annaliese Lange married a brutal Nazi and the voyage to America is her ticket to freedom. On the voyage truths be revealed and only one of them will, in the end, disembark in New York Harbor.

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