Love and Retribution
Widowed early in the war after only a few months of marriage, nurse Emmy Penry-Jones has often taken in shipwrecked sailors over the war years, caring for them in her parents’ spectacular house on the cliffs of Cornwall. Small village life keeps her busy as she cares for her ailing mother, tends a small vegetable garden, and donates goods baked with bartered rations. So, it’s no surprise when she finds two men unconscious on the beach below her home. As she nurses them back to health in the summer of 1943, she falls deeply in love with Max whom she discovers is a German U-boat captain. Despite their origins, Emmy doesn’t report her castaways, and when they leave for France after regaining their health, she is heartbroken and spends the next two years wondering about Max’s fate. Her first indication that he is alive and well is when she hears he is charged with sinking a British hospital ship, and she risks everything to go to Germany and testify in his defence.
Love and Retribution is told partially from a German, anti-Nazi point-of-view, providing a less common perspective of WWII. The novel is heavily researched, with impressive attention to detail about home front wartime campaigns, rationing, British naval intelligence, Reich politics, and U-boat engineering, but at times it feels unwieldy with overly detailed description and unnecessary exposition, and the flow between the Cornwall and the German stories feels disjointed. There were a couple of events (plot spoilers here!) that stretched credulity, and I felt that the novel might benefit from exclusion of some tangential storylines which could be accomplished without compromising a sound narrative. All in all, an informative novel which will appeal to lovers of tension-filled WWII romances with a number of unexpected twists and turns.
