The Last Year of the War
A metaphorical thief. The war. Lost friendship. And Davenport, Iowa, my hometown. The Last Year of the War grabbed me from the first sentence. Even if the reader isn’t from Davenport, which was obviously thoroughly researched and is portrayed in detailed accuracy, the story of Elise Sontag’s life will enthrall and inform just the same.
The Last Year of the War begins with Elise’s sunset years in 2010 and her quest to reconnect with her old friend, Mariko, who she met at an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas, for so-called suspicious German and Japanese immigrants during World War II. The book then jumps back to 1943, before Elise’s life was turned upside down. The rest is told by flipping between 2010 and the past, taking us through Elise’s entire life until the stories converge in the present, all the while seamlessly weaving in historical facts. Meissner provides a sense of World War II as an American immigrant interned in America as well as a German in Germany during and immediately after the war (even though Elise was born in Iowa and had never been to Germany), and then as an American immigrant in the post-World War II era.
There is the mystery in an outer story of why this childhood friend was so important to Elise; a primary inner story of where Elise belongs in the world, how she finds her way back to America, and what happens with her family after the war; and a secondary inner story of what happens in a book she and Mariko were writing as children. Meissner keeps the suspense moving by braiding these mysteries together from the first page through the last, tossing in several plot twists along the way, and creating an unpredictable, can’t-put-down novel.
