Review: The Last Year of the War

The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars

In a timely story of US internment camps, Meissner has crafted a moving novel about a young German-American girl, Elise Sontag, whose family was held in the Crystal City Texas camp with suspected Nazi and Japanese sympathizers, and deported to Germany at the end of the Second World War. It is in the camp that Elise meets Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American girl from Los Angeles and the friendship of a lifetime is forged. Mariko is writ large upon Elise's life, with her hopes of becoming a writer and critic, and her warm manner with Elise, who had just moved to the camp and started attending the camp school. Their friendship means everything to Elise. Only after each family is deported to their parents' country of origin, the girls fall out of touch. Mariko marries young and remains in Japan. Elise marries as well, eventually immigrating back to the US with her husband, settling in Los Angeles and making a life for herself and her two children. Decades later, widowed and suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease, Elise searches for Mariko, feeling a compulsion to reconnect with her friend before she forgets even the early years of her life. With the disease stripping away so many of her recent memories, the memories of her early life and the friendship that left its mark on her becomes paramount in her mind. Locating Mariko in San Francisco, where she has settled as a widow with her daughter Rina, Elise eludes her family and carers to fly to San Francisco, in hopes of reconnecting with Mariko and fulfilling their childhood promise of finishing a story they were writing together.

This novel is notable for dispelling the popular misconception that only Japanese-Americans were interned during WWII and that those interned just went back to their lives and livelihoods in the US after the war. From 1942 until 1945, The Crystal City Texas camp held Japanese, German and Italian Americans, and additionally Latin American Italians. Over 4700 people were interned in the camp, and those housed there were mainly family groups. (Families were usually kept together at this juncture in the US's internment camp history.) The majority of those in this camp were repatriated/deported to the head of household's country of origin to countries devastated by the war, and countries that they had chosen to leave long before WWII.

"Mariko would tell me that she believed there were two kinds of mirrors. There was the kind you could look into to see what you looked like, and there was the kind you looked into and saw what other people thought you looked like."

One of the things I loved about this novel was that it allows the reader to see those interned in camps as people, and shows that the effects of internment echo on long after those interned are released. While there were some aspects of the central character's inner voice that didn't fully resonate for me, overall I felt the novel was a fine historical fiction recounting of a shadowed area of US history.

I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from Penguin Random House's First to Read program in exchange for an honest review. Berkley Press requested early review of this title, which releases March 19, 2019.

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