Journal Entry 1 by Sidney1220 from McLean, Virginia USA on Saturday, July 12, 2008

Received from bookmooch.
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Sophie de Havilland fled London and her past, vowing never to return. In Germany, she sought solace with her aunt, and couldn't help but admire how the Third Reich had reclaimed a country so near ruin. But soon the veneer crumbled. Beneath the frenetic nightlife of 1939 Berlin, the swirling parties with the dashing SS in their night-black uniforms and their beautiful dames, she saw cancer growing. Stories of an impossible nature- terrible stories, terrible crimes- she began to believe. These Nazis were Germany's demon lover: handsome, fearsome, faithless, murderous. Her aunt had been right to seek escape. But, was it possible? One man offered hope: a handsom half-American. But while his spicy scent of strong arms seduced her with safety, the lightning on his collar and his searinb blue eyes reminded her that sometimes the handsomest faces hide perfidious intent. 

Journal Entry 2 by Sidney1220 from McLean, Virginia USA on Saturday, January 10, 2009

Reading this book is just an exercise in frustration. It has a really interesting premise and a storyline that could have been involving. Could have been- if it didn't have such shoddy execution and feature such amateurish writing. The writing and the dialogue in this book reads more like a 7th grader's homework than work done by a published author, not to mention the fact that the author obviousy didn't do any research except to look up a couple of historical facts and German terms. In the book, the SS officers referred to themselves as Nazis and the Nazi party several times, which would not have have happened. The women also kept on referring to themselves as Aryan, which also seems kinda iffy to me. And would a British woman really have been as well received and moved in the highest levels of society as the heroine Sophie did if Germany was at war with Britain just because she's got blonde hair and blue eyes?

And then there's the heroine, Sophie, whose believe in the Third Reich at the beginning just made her seem like such an idiot. How could she not have known what was happening in the concentration camps? Did she live in a cave? Her eventual transformation from believing in the Third Reich to hating them also had a ring of falseness to it, as she didn't feel that strongly about what was happening to the Jews one way or another until an incident that happened impacted her personally. I didn't believe for a second that she didn't know, it felt like she just didn't care until it hit her on the homefront.

Historical fictions set during WWI are hard to come by, which only made this book all the more disappointing and that much of a travesty.

1/27/09 Reserved for romance vbb.