Okay, that's a bit harsh. Or is it? Because Gretchen Muller, our protagonist, is the daughter of one of Adolf Hitler's friends. Uncle Dolf has always been a prominent figure in Gretchen's life and her views are pretty racist and right-wing - Jews are the anti-Christ, they're dirty, conniving, sub-human. You know, typical 1930's Germany. But then she meets Daniel, who is intelligent and, as I mentioned, hot and this makes her realise that Jewish people aren't all that bad.
Pretty flimsy reason to change your entire worldview, but there you go. At least she showed some character development, which is more than I can say for some other books I've read recently.
So Gretchen realises that, shock horror, Jewish people are human beings too but where does this leave her with good old Uncle Dolf. You probably don't need me to tell you that it's nowhere good, especially when you factor in Gretchen's sociopath brother, who is one of Hitler's hired thugs. Gretchen's development coupled with the danger of having Jewish sympathies in 1930s Munich makes for a pretty good story.
If the book suffers from anything, it is probably a bit over long. There are entire chapters that could have stood being cut out or amagamated to make the plot flow quicker.
I also found Gretchen pretty naive and willfuly blind as to what was going on around her. She doesn't really seem to know much about how dreadfully Jewish people are being treated like literally right under her nose. And when she does see evidence of it, she just kind of ignores it or sighs and shrugs.
Will I read the next book in the series? Don't know. If I had a copy thrust under my nose and there was nothing else in the pipeline i might give it a go, but it's been a couple of weeks since I read this book and I can hardly remember what happened so I'm not going to make a huge effort to get the sequel.
3 stars