Uncovering Hope in the Final Days of World War II: Susan Meissner's The Last Year of the War

KMarie: A unique WW II book about victims not participants. Characters that won your heart.

United States on Aug 30, 2023

Glenna Jackson: I started this book as just something to read between other good reads. But I was surprised by an endearing story that opened my eyes to the prejudice in the United States and Europe.

United States on Aug 28, 2023

Marion Marchetto, author: I’ve previously read a couple of books by author Susan Meissner and they held my interest. This one, The Last Year of the War, continues in the same vein.

The main character is Elise Sontag, whom we meet at the point in her life when she’s beginning to lose her memory to early stage Alzheimer’s Disease. Elise is on her way to San Francisco to find her long-ago friend Mariko Inoue. They’ve been apart for 60 years. Time is growing short for Elise who has to fight the encroaching memory thief that she’s christened Agnes. Agnes, it seems, is trying to confuse Elise as she travels. So Elise embarks on recalling every facet of her life from 1943 (when her father was first arrested as a Nazi sympathizer in their home in Davenport, Iowa) to the present moment as she journeys to San Francisco.

The bulk of the story centers around three distinct events. First, there is the move of their entire family to an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. Although both of Elise’s parents are German natives, they have been in the U.S. for twenty years. Both Elise and her brother Max are first generation Americans. It is at the internment camp that Elise meets Mariko, a first...

United States on Apr 12, 2022

kaybee: I don't care for historical fiction, but Meissner's writing grabbed me when I read the sample. Such an interesting and well written book from the beginning to the end, full of interesting detail and plenty of emotion to go with it. This will not be the last Meissner book I will read!

Canada on Jun 17, 2021

Stephanie McCall: First off, I'd like to commend Susan Meissner for writing a WWII story that taught me several things I didn't know. I always like to learn when reading, and The Last Year of the War fit the bill. Like most people, I wager, I knew nothing about German-American internment, or even much about Japanese internment on the East Coast. I knew nothing about repatriation back to Japan or Germany. So just the fact that The Last Year of the War exists and is widely read is, to me, a triumph. The sub-genre of WWII fiction needs more books like this.

Beyond that, The Last Year of the War is a unique and overall well-told story. I usually hate it when authors tell instead of show, even and perhaps especially in first person POV. Telling over showing does happen here, and arguably more than it should. But Susan pulled off a first person POV correctly. I didn't mind Elise telling me her story, because her voice is authentic, whether she's writing as a 2010 elderly woman or looking back on her teenage years in the 1940s. Elise always sounds like a real person, directly from her time period (rather than, say, a modern protagonist dressed in '40s clothing and slang, who we're supposed to...

United States on Feb 16, 2021

Silver Pearl: Worth your time to read this. I haven’t finished it yet because I am savouring ever chapter.

Canada on Aug 23, 2020

matthew roberts-ward: I loved the story and the way it captured the feelings of the characters involved

United Kingdom on Jul 25, 2020