Happy Friday, and welcome to First Line Friday, hosted by Hoarding Books. I had the very great pleasure of reading Amy Lynn Green’s debut novel Things We Didn’t Say this week. It’s an intelligent, witty, insightful, and thought-provoking epistolary novel (meaning it’s told though letters), and I strongly encourage you to pick it up! You can read my full review here.
Headstrong Johanna Berglund, a linguistics student at the University of Minnesota, has very definite plans for her future . . . plans that do not include returning to her hometown and the secrets and heartaches she left behind there. But the US Army wants her to work as a translator at a nearby camp for German POWs.
Johanna arrives to find the once-sleepy town exploding with hostility. Most patriotic citizens want nothing to do with German soldiers laboring in their fields, and they’re not afraid to criticize those who work at the camp as well. When Johanna describes the trouble to her friend Peter Ito, a language instructor at a school for military intelligence officers, he encourages her to give the town that rejected her a second chance.
As Johanna interacts with the men of the camp and censors their letters home, she begins to see the prisoners in a more sympathetic light…