This book felt like it was trying to do a lot and failed in pretty much every respect. 

For starters, I hated the main character and the whole contemporary timeline. She was annoying. She had very little personality, constantly made obviously terrible decisions (she loves warm and sunny days, rain and winter give her anxiety- so she moves to San Francisco. brilliant), and treated people really badly. I think we were supposed to connect with her flaws, but she was just so shallow and insufferable. I didn't care about anything she did or any of her romantic drama.

This book was trying to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and current immigration problems in the US. Which could have been fine, but McCoy didn't really discuss anything? Like one of the characters is a border patrol agent and is responsible for sending people back to Mexico and he feels guilty, but that's pretty much it. The only reason given for why he does it is that he's following the rules. Which again, I get that she's drawing parallels to Nazi Germany, but that's more than a bit heavy handed. This could have been so interesting in theory, but the entire contemporary timeline was focused on Reba's romantic problems and dissatisfaction with herself.

There were bits here and there that contained a lot of serious topics (like her abusive father who apparently raped people when he was a soldier), but those were barely delved into. They just kind of existed as brief mentions. This was true for the historical timeline as well.

In terms of the historical timeline, it was a lot more interesting with better developed characters and more purpose, but it still wasn't great. One of the worst parts of the comparison between Nazi Germany and present day immigration was that the present day characters were treated as normal people who made mistakes and grew. The Nazi characters were mostly evil rapists and murderers. I'm not trying to argue that there were "good Nazis," but the scariest thing is that they weren't all a bunch of sociopaths. They were average people who still did monstrous things. I kind of thought that's where this book was going with the comparison, but then it kind of just focused on Nazi dudes who raped their friend's fiance and the good Germans who worked against them. It kind of felt like it circumvented the point of the book.

Also, this is totally the pettiest criticism known to man, but the main character in the contemporary setting at one point wears a Richmond Flying Squirrels jersey. Unless there is another Richmond Flying Squirrels (which seems unlikely?), that's just not possible. The contemporary timeline was set in 2008 and the Flying Squirrels started in 2010. I get that this doesn't really matter to anyone else, but I found it so annoying that I had to put the book down for a while. It does not take a lot of research to correct little things like that, especially for an author who lived in Richmond.

I feel like there were a lot of interesting intentions happening here, but it failed for me. The best thing I can say is that the writing flowed pretty smoothly and I was emotionally attached to Elsie, the German girl in the historical timeline.