Author: Lucy Sanna
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publisher, 2016
Pages: 352
Rating: Recommend
The war has taken its toll on the Christiansen family. With food rationed and money scarce, Charlotte struggles to keep her family well fed. Her teenage daughter, Kate, raises rabbits to earn money for college and dreams of becoming a writer. Her husband, Thomas, struggles to keep the farm going while their son, and most of the other local men, are fighting in Europe.
When their upcoming cherry harvest is threatened, strong-willed Charlotte helps persuade local authorities to allow German war prisoners from a nearby camp to the pick the fruit.
But when Thomas befriends one of the prisoners, a teacher named Karl, and invites him to tutor Kate, the implications of Charlotte's decision become apparent - especially when she finds herself unexpectedly drawn to Karl. So busy are they with the prisoners that Charlotte and Thomas fail to see that Kate is becoming a young woman, with dreams and temptations of her own - including a secret romance with the son of a wealthy, war-profiteering senator. And when their beloved Ben returns home, bitter and injured, bearing an intense hatred of Germans, Charlotte's secrets threaten to explode their world.
Review: A World War II novel set in the United States? Yes please. I was hooked from the first page. Approximately midway through something happened and I thought for sure this book had jumped the shark, but the author reigned it back in.
At times I wasn't sure if I was reading a historical fiction or young adult novel, but overall I enjoyed this. There was more this author could have explored, and several reviews mentioned the ending was rather weak, but still a different sort of World War II story. I'll take it.
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