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Summary
Summary
A compelling novel of a young American woman in Berlin on the eve of World War II who is torn between her love for a Nazi officer and her duty to her country. The naive daughter of the American ambassador, Sally is madly in love with a golden boy caught in Hitler's horrifying grip. LG Featured Alternate. Martin's.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
YA-- At first, The Last Innocent Hour appears to tell merely a beautiful love story overlaid with a patina of sadness and pathos. However, the novel evolves into a powerfully moving tale of the realities of World War II. The book begins after the war when Sally Jackson, now in a special army unit designed to study photographs of Nazis and war crimes, returns to Berlin. Flashbacks reveal how her idyllic life there slowly turned into the horrors of Nazi Germany. Naively marrying her handsome childhood sweetheart, Christian, an S. S. officer, she was drawn into a maelstrom of parties, decadence, and intrigue that finally resulted in absolute terror for her. She escaped (barely) and now, 12 years later, faces the haunting fear that Christian might still be alive. Her fears become reality, and, in the end, instigate the shattering climax of the novel. A deeply meaningful, riveting story of love, evil, loss, and finally redemption, this book will be appreciated by a diverse cross section of readers. --Bunni Union, Young Adult Services, Geauga West Library, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Abbott's absorbing first novel about an American woman's romance in Nazi Germany. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Girl meets boy, boy meets S.S. in this sturdy, sudsy pre- and postwar Nazi gothic. Like other gothic heroines, Sally Jackson is ambivalently drawn to remote, masterful men--her blank ambassadorial father, her radiantly blond childhood sweetheart Christian Mayr, and S.S. chief Reinhard Heydrich, much the most magnetic of the three. Sandwiched between a 1946 prologue and an epilogue--in which sadder-but-wiser Sally, now examining photographs for military intelligence, searches for confirmation that Christian survived the surrender and is implicated in war crimes--a long flashback shows Sally growing up alongside Christian's wholesome Bavarian family, returning to Germany when FDR taps her father to head the legation, finding a fencing coach with Heydrich's help and playing duets with him as he climbs the Nazi hierarchy, asking his help in locating Christian (who naturally turns up on Heydrich's own S.S. staff), dallying briefly with Jewish newspaperman David Wohl, and finally settling into a perilous romantic triangle: Christian, overcoming his initial reluctance to get involved with his general's woman, attacks, impregnates, and marries her, and sweeps her off on a storybook honeymoon, while Heydrich (``You never call me by my name'') plots against them, throwing Christian into prison, announcing that he intends to destroy Sally by making her desire him, and intimating that he's been behind Christian's tender/brutal behavior all along. The predictable climax comes when Heydrich forces her to cross swords with him literally, setting Christian's freedom against her unborn baby's life. A fascinating twist on the premise of gothic romance: it's the Nazis who are responsible for the brooding hero's threatening mood swings. The large readership that the publisher predicts for this naively disillusioned first novel won't mind that the last innocent hour of the ambassador's daughter lasts for chapter after improbable chapter.
Library Journal Review
In 1946, Sally Jackson, an army intelligence officer working to help prosecute war criminals, returns to a ruined Berlin. As she spends her days viewing photographs of Nazi atrocities, she must confront the ghosts of her past, when she was a naive young daughter of the American ambassador in Berlin before the war. Although memories constantly assault her as she walks amidst the city's rubble, her past erupts when a series of photos reveals her ex-husband (a Nazi SS guard) murdering a child. A flashback reveals the awful contrast between pre-war surface glitter and the brutalities later inflicted on the country and on the innocent young woman. Ultimately, a physician colleague helps Sally to confront her past and begin a new life. This gripping first novel offers a fresh approach to the period. For all fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/91.--Ed.-- Joan Hinke meyer, Library Consultant, Denver (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
