Even though I have read other Susan Meissner books, I was not prepared to love this story as much as I did. I know she pulls you in early and doesn't let you go but this story of Elise and Mariko is her best one yet!! The research that goes into this book is impeccable. I am so critical of historical fiction if I find even one wrong history fact. But don't worry. Susan has done her research and you will learn more about the internment camps than I have read in any other book. I love how she covered the German occupants and Japanese occupants of the camps giving us the story from both points of view. Elise's story is one of courage unlike anything we can imagine a 17 year old girl to have and yet she does it so perfect we route for Elise to have the best life ever!

Susan Meissner weaves an emotional story following Elise Sontag. With a flashback timeline, readers are taken on this unique point of view during 1943 and learn about the internment camps here in the United States. Throughout the journey, there is the mystery of what happened to Elise's friend Mariko that also had me turning the pages quickly to learn more! Elise is a formidable character who I was rooting for throughout all the obstacles thrown at her. I also appreciated learning about these aspects of World War II that are not often written or talked about. Thank you to NetGalley and Berkeley for an advanced copy! All thoughts and opinions are my own!

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I enjoy reading historical fiction about WWII. Almost all of the books I have read are set in Europe. This book focuses on the Japanese Internment camps in the US. The story is very compelling and gives the reader a look it an aspect of WWII that is often forgotten.

This was a unique perspective of a WWII story. While I don't typically enjoy historical fiction that also intertwines with a present-day story, I thought that starting out the story with Elsie as she's grown old was a great way to introduce the storyline before flashing back to the past. The plot provided an interesting look into American internment camps and the way that many Americans didn't feel as connected to the war at times with it taking place overseas. I really enjoyed this book!

Such a touching story about friendship and war and how during hard times things still find a way to work out.

Meissner can always capture some historical event and examine the events through a unique story. She writes such captivating historical fiction, and this book is no exception. I loved how she highlighted American internment camps along with immigrants and legal citizens being sent back to their home country. There is so much more in this book, too. Highly recommend for historical fiction lovers.

The book starts and we get to meet Elise, who is now eldery and is diagnosed with dementia. One of her last wishes before her memory is getting worse is seeing her childhood friend Mariko again. She finds out if she is still alive and travels to San Francisco where she meets Mariko's daughter who is the manager of the hotel she is staying in. She tells her that Mariko doesn't have to live long anymore because she had a severe stroke, but Elise is just right on time to see Mariko again and talk about their past, where they met when they where teens..
Life is just normal for fourteen year old Elise Sontag, daughter from German parents living in the USA in 1943. World War II is going in in Europe, it feels far away but they feel very aware of it. Everything changes in her life when her father, who has been an American resident for two decades is arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer, and shortly after, their family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where German and Japanese people, seen as state enemies, are being interned together, in barracks behindbarbed wire, watched by guards. Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. She meets a new friend though, 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 and they dream of what they will become when the war is over. But the pressure from their families is too much to survive their friendship at the end and after the war, and they will not see or hear from each other again until they final meetup when Mariko is almost passing away..



This is not a very light and happy read, but as you read the synopsis before hand, that's also not to be expected, so if you are looking for that type of book, this might not be your choice. If you are in though for a serious, beautiful written book with a deep story line, this might be the book for you. I found the storyline and main characters interesting. Elise is the main focus of the book and it was interesting and different to. She brought an interesting perspective as someone who has lived her whole life as an American and yet she and her family were treated like the enemy and eventually sent to live in Germany. When the story moved to Germany it brought with it even more tension as you knew from history the war was coming to a close but yet was still bringing destruction.

A lot of sad tragic events happening, especially when the family moves back to Germany, where they also don't feel at home, and the author kept the storyline thrilling and moving until the end, which was also a good conclusion to the book.

This story of two kindred spirits became more powerful the more I read it. This is the type of novel that will leave an impact. I absolutely LOVED Hugh and Elise!

The Last Year of the War by Susan Meisser is historical fiction at its best and was an excellent read. The plot was compelling and the characters quickly wound their way into my heart. And the “voice” of the novel was incredibly well done probably because the author had so meticulously researched the World War II settings of the book and wound fictional characters around very real events. I know so much about this historical era—having had a father who fought in this war—that I have trouble reading books set in this era that have characters who act like modern people. This was not the case in this book. Meisser is to be commended.

As recently as June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court officially overturned a 1944 ruling called the Korematsu decision which legalized the forced internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, 11,000 German Americans, and 3,000 Italian Americans during World War II.

Internment camps were built in various parts of America, but, the camp that features in this book housed entire families and was located in Crystal City, TX, thirty miles from the Mexican border. In the past, I reviewed an excellent nonfiction book on this topic which I highly recommend if you would like to learn more: The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II by Russell. This fictional book describes the camp well.

Enter the main character of the book, 14-year-old Elise Sontag of Davenport, Iowa, born in America to parents who immigrated from Germany a couple of decades earlier who became proud Americans. The year is 1943. Here is an excerpt from the book in which Elise is remembering what happened when the FBI suddenly came and arrested her father one day:

“They said they were from the FBI,” Mommi said, her voice breaking. She brought a hand up to her mouth and it shook as if electrified.

“What did they want with Otto?” (neighbor asks) I’m not sure Mommi knew at that point exactly why Papa had been arrested. My parents had heard that since the United States had entered the war, German Americans who were known sympathizers of the Third Reich had been arrested and some interned. And they knew that since Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese Americans had been rounded up and interned, too, many of them simply because they were issei, Japanese-born immigrants to the United States. Most had done nothing wrong; they had simply been born inside a nation with whom we were now at war. But Papa wasn’t a sympathizer of the Axis powers. He had been a legal resident of the United States for eighteen years. He believed Adolf Hitler to be a dangerous man. He didn’t have close family fighting in the Wehrmacht. He didn’t have hatred in his heart for the Jews. He didn’t have hatred in his heart for anyone.”

The family end up in the Crystal City camp—“a postage-stamp-sized parcel of desert bounded by barbed wire”—where Elise makes friends with a Japanese American girl, Mariko, from Los Angeles who is her same age.

Remembering her father’s arrest later in the camp Elise thinks:

“As I watched the black car that held my father disappear around the block, the strongest sensation I had was not that this couldn’t be happening, but that it was. It was like being awakened from a stupor, not falling into a nightmare. I couldn’t have explained it to anyone then. Not even to myself. It was only in the years that followed that I realized this was the moment my eyes were opened to what the world is really like. Months later, in the internment camp, Mariko would tell me she believed there were two kinds of mirrors. There was the kind you looked into to see what you looked like, and then there was the kind you looked into and saw what other people thought you looked like.

The moment my father left with those men, that second mirror was thrust in my face. And there it stayed.”


After eighteen months in the camp, the war gets worse for the family when they are “repatriated “ against their will to a collapsing, Nazi-ruled Germany as the war in Europe is nearing its end. The family is ordered to make fuses for bombs that Germany will drop on their former homeland ( which they sabotage), and they huddle in cellars to escape the bombs that their former homeland is dropping on their new country multiple times. The only bright light is that Elise gets to meet her paternal grandmother whom she is named after for the first time in her life.

Elise’s father is from a town in Bavaria where his family had a watch making business. Not long after they arrive, they survive one of their first bombings. From the book:

“In the months and years that followed the air raid on Pforzheim on the twenty-third of February—the same day Papa received those orders to Berlin—I would learn of the full scope of the attack. I would have a chance to read all the details that military correspondents and war department assessors and meticulous historians would pen about that night. It is one thing to read the account of an event, however. It is quite another to experience it.

Newsreels would announce to Allied civilian viewers, after the fact, that Pforzheim had been destroyed, as though it was a dangerous beast that had been successfully dealt with rather than a city of mostly ordinary people. More than eighty percent of its structures were destroyed or damaged in that one night of bombing. Ninety percent of the city center was reduced to ashes, including the Sontag watch shop. Some historians would say the destruction in Pforzheim was the greatest proportion of damage in one raid during the entire war.

Nearly eighteen thousand men, women, and children perished, dozens of them dear friends of Papa’s extended family. Some died immediately from the impact of one of the five hundred exploding incendiary devices that fell. Others died in infernos the bombs created and from which they could not escape. Some suffocated where they crouched because the bombs sucked all the oxygen out of the air. Some were buried in their cellars or couldn’t run fast enough out of their collapsing houses. Some burned and drowned in the two rivers that ran through the city, which in happier years had given Pforzheim a lovely pastoral beauty but during the bombing curdled aflame in a phosphorous stew.”

War is hell and innocent people are affected and this novel describes this well.

After the war ends, 17 year old Elise ends up meeting an American GI in a bakery in Stuttgart where she is working after her family is relocated from bombed Pforzheim, and they end up marrying and she returns to America.

Thank you Berkley and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book and for allowing me to review it. Published 19 March 2019.

This book had so much promise when I requested it to read. I have read other books by this author and though slow in pace have really enjoyed them. This one for some reason just did not manage to gather me into the story and after many attempts I was forced to give up. It has sat on my shelf for so long now that I am forced to mark it as a Did Not Finish and move on.
The fault is mine not the authors.

THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR by Susan Meissner took me way too long to finish because I couldn’t devote the time needed to this beautiful story the first time around. When I picked it up two days ago, I read it like a woman on a mission. Meissner has such a skill for historical fiction and creating fully developed characters that you genuinely care for. This novel not only covers the internment camps that Japanese and German citizens were sent to but also the toll that being German in WWII had on a family that identified with America and not Germany. By telling the story in two time periods (as a child at the beginning of their life and a woman at the end), the reader gets to see how the terror of the war and the upheaval shaped the person Elise becomes along with the impact of relationships formed during this time. I loved the last third with the introduction of the Dove family and Elise reaching adulthood. A truly compelling and well written novel.

Even though this is a work of fiction, it opened my eyes to the realities faced by persons who immigrated to the United States. Detention centers, and deportations took place based only on nationality, not of the accumulated history of a person as a resident of the U.S. So ethnic profiling is not a new concept; it is one that has deep roots in our country. I enjoyed the story, and embraced the characters and the plight.

This is such a wonderful story! It brought new light to the interment camps. I love the dynamic between Elise and Mariko. I really love the friendship between these two girls -who would never have met under any other circumstances. I was really surprised that even though these two girls were held against their will for not being "American" they still held unto the American dream. These girls still wanted to be young Americans and looked forward to their lives once released. That was so humbling for me. A really wonderful historical read! Love Susan Meissner!

Not all war stories have an unhappy ending. Two little American girls from opposite sides of the US, one of German descent, one of Japanese descent, find themselves together under circumstances that neither of them would have predicted—in an internment camp in the last months of the war. Both girls, born in the US, of parents who had legally come to the country over a decade ago, have known no other home than in the States. And yet, in the blink of an eye, they have both become foreigners. Susan Meissner tells an often heartbreaking story of the lives of these two girls from their own adolescent and then adult eyes in such a way that the reader becomes a part of the story.

Overnight the world became incomprehensible for many German and Japanese families living legally in the US during the time when the government felt like the internment camps were necessary. Meissner paints an often hard to read picture of the devastation that went on in the lives of “normal people” during the war. Not only the lives lost, but also the towns destroyed, the livelihoods evaporated, and the sense of community wounded in such a way that it would take decades to heal.

This book does an outstanding job of communicating the loss, confusion, and upheaval many American families endured in “the last year of the war,” while weaving a tale that entices the reader page after page.

Why did I wait so long to read this book? It has been with me since Nov 2018 & I am appalled with myself that I wasted so much time NOT having read it.

Yet again, Susan Meissner has blown me away with the beautiful story she managed to build. This story is about more than just a war. It is a story of friendship. Two girls from different nationalities are found together both find themselves at the same internment camp which their families have been sent to after being found to be threats to the US. Too soon they are ripped apart & Elise and her family are sent to Germany. Elise, a born American, has to pick up the pieces of her new life in a country she isn’t familiar with and a language she doesn’t speak.

The underlying message I got from this story is about choices. The choices we make or which are made for us have an effect on the course of our lives. One small change could send us on a completely different course, meeting different people, leading completely alternate lives. This story is about accepting those choices, accepting the fact that while things may not always go the way you hope or plan, that they often end up working out the way they were meant to. And that no amount of time or distance can ever keep apart true friendship.

Before her memories succumb to Agnes (Altzeimers' disease), 90 year old Elise wants to reconnect with Mariko, her best friend in a WWII internment camp. In flashbacks, we learn her story.

Since I live on the West Coast, I was, of course, familiar with the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. This is a familiar story told and retold as a cautionary tale about racism and insensitivity. I was not, however, familiar with the fact that German-Americans and Italian-Americans were also arrested and "repatriated" to their home countries in exchange for Americans held by the Nazis. That is Elise's story -- she was born in the US to immigrant parents who had lived in the US for 20 years, but had not yet applied for citizenship before the war. This is a heart-breaking and very readable story. Meissner really puts her readers in the middle of the camp in Texas and in the middle of the war once the family is sent back to Germany. The chapters that are set in the present day, and Elise's battle with her memory loss filled me with sympathy and sorrow. But this is ultimately the story of friendship and hope despite the circumstances.

I was pleased to find a WWII story that tells a story that has not been told and retold over and over. This is definitely a stand-out among the plethora of new novels set in the time period. Well worth the time.

In 1943, when Elise Sontag is just 14-years old, her Father is arrested under suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer.

A neighborhood boy, in their small Iowa town, claimed that Mr. Sontag told him he was 'making a bomb'; a completely baseless accusation.

Sadly, that was all it took for the FBI to show up on the Sontag doorstep. The lives of the family would never be the same.

Ultimately, they, along with numerous other Japanese, German and Italian families were sent to an internment camp in rural-Texas, only taking with them what they could easily carry.

Their lives before nothing but a distant memory.

As a teen, Elise didn't fully understand what was happening to them. She tries to take it one day at a time and just make the best of it. That's a hard task for anyone, let alone a kid.

Early on, she meets a fellow internee, Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American girl from L.A., and the two become fast friends, bonding over their shared experience.

This story follows them through their time at the camp and beyond into adulthood. Told by an elderly Elise, I found this story heartbreaking.

Although this is purely a work of fiction, this situation did in fact happen to many, many families. That is a humbling thing to think about.

The strength of spirit it would take to overcome what the families in this story went through. I can't even imagine. I really enjoy when historical fiction is able to bring the past to life in such a palpable and touching way.

It was overwhelming for me at times. Particularly the moments told by present day Elise, as she struggles with her pending memory loss and slide into the grips of Alzheimer's. That hit very close to home for me and was hard to read.

I thought, as always, Meissner tackled each of the topics explored in here with care and grace. She has a beautiful storytelling ability and I was definitely swept away in Elise's tale.

There were a few minor details that I wasn't crazy about, some descriptions that I thought were a little odd, but overall, this was a wonderful book and I know a lot of people will enjoy it!

Thank you so much to the publisher, Berkley Publishing Group, for providing me with a copy of this to read and review. I apologize for taking so long to get to it and am kicking myself for not picking it up earlier!

3.9 - the plot and characters seemed to hit a lull in the middle; it seemed as though some material could have been removed to shorten the book, which would have strengthened the overall novel.

There were so many things I really loved about The Last Year of the War. I loved the idea of a woman with Alzheimer’s searching for her friend before she can no longer remember her. I loved how Elise named her Alzheimer’s and talked to her. I loved the story of her life in the internment camp and learning more about that time in our county’s history. I knew that Japanese Americans were kept in these camps but I did not know that German Americans also were. I also loved learning about what life was like in these camps. Elise and her family are sent to Germany during the last year of the war and I really liked reading the perspective of a family living in Germany during the end of the war. I could easily picture what these different experiences were all like and how difficult it was for a young girl. I loved the characters during these times and felt drawn to them and felt their heartbreaks.

The end of the book was not as good for me as the beginning. I wasn’t really sure about some of the decisions that Elise made and they seemed to come out of no where. The characters in the first part of the book seemed in depth and characters in the last part seemed rushed and I didn’t really feel like I knew them. The ending felt a bit rushed, which after all the details of the beginning was a disappointment.

As with all Susan Meissner's books that I've read, the characters come alive on the page, the story is gripping, and I learn something about history that I never knew. In this beautifully written novel, the story of German Americans held in internment camps in the US during WWII opened my eyes to a bit of history I'd never learned in school. I love how Meissner crafts her novels in dual time bringing the reader from past to present and feeling she's in each scene. I highly recommend this book.