The Last Year of the War

ISBN: 0451492153

Author: Susan Meissner

Iowa, 1943. Elise Sontag's father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer, and the family is sent to an internment camp in Texas. Behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. When the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, will Elise be able to rise above prejudice and hatred and re-claim her own destiny? -- adapted from publisher's info.