In Love and War is a short story about Mack McInnis and Inga Kaufener. They meet in the summer of 1933, both are teenagers in high school and they fall in love. The Kaufener family moved to America from Germany, with the threat of another war looming and the young couple are worried. The Kaufener’s are sent back to Germany, they have lived in America for seven years and are now classed as enemy aliens.

Mack and Inga are both devastated, Mack hides in a remote cabin for six months and Inga is forced to make a difficult decision in Germany. Mack like all other young American men joins the armed forces, being an experienced pilot he’s sent England and he’s soon dropping bomb over Germany. He knows Inga lives in Wiemar, he hates what he’s doing and he has no choice. Inga’s young brothers and her aging father are all called up to fight for Germany.

Mack and Inga endure the terrible war years, both suffer the loss of loved ones, the stress of being apart, hoping one day they will see each other again and get married like they had planned as teenagers.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley, a quick and short read and three stars from me.

** spoiler alert ** Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for an ARC to review.

I really wanted to like this book. The storyline had so much promise! A German girl, Inga, who immigrated with her family to Florida between WWI and WWII falls in love with a local boy, Mack, but the family returns to Germany to avoid being arrested for being suspected Nazi’s. Boy unwillingly joins up, asks to fight in the Pacific so he doesn’t have to fight Germany, get diverted by Doolittle himself because of his experience piloting his Dad’s plane back home, boy ends up on a bomber making raids into Germany from England. Meanwhile, girl’s return to Germany is as horrible as the reader can imagine. Interspersed are scenes of Mack’s sister Mary and her husband David, who was also Mack’s friend at school, and Jewish, and joined as a medic and saw more battletime than Mack.

Here’s where I had problems. So many good story lines that were never developed! I almost felt like I was reading the synopsis of a novel. Mack’s Dad is on the draft board, and on the CAP, but you don’t really hear anything about that until he’s killed shooting at a German sub. Inga gets involved with the resistance back in German when she enrolls in University, but it’s only mentioned once, when she puts fliers in front of a classroom. And after David gets captured and sent to Buchenwald, he swears he sees Inga in town, and they smile at each other, then nothing.

Characters aren’t fully developed then do things that don’t seem to be in their character. Inga’s Dad for instance. First, when he is told that he might be arrested as a possible Nazi sympathizer, he just says, huh, ok, I’ll just take my family back to the hellhole that I escaped from and that I’ve been saying how horrible a place it is and I’ve seen how terrible they treat their citizens, and oh yah, I barely survived the last war and I know if I go my three sons will get conscripted and likely die, but that has to be better than being taken in for questioning her in America. Nope. Then, when he is acting as an interpreter for an interrogator, the interrogator shoots the prisoner and Juergen turns and shoots the interrogator, then Juergen is shot by the guard. Um, dumb. Was there another reason other than “because”.

Finally, there were no segues between scenes, no build up to climactic events, and no closures. Something happens, the end. Next thing happens, the end. Mom makes lunch, the end. Father dies by submarine, the end. Girl goes to park, the end. David looses his colon in a bomb blast, the end. Mack’s plane gets hit and the pilot’s brains explode all over him, the end. David gets captured by the Germans and put into a concentration camp because he’s a Jewish, the end. The war ends, the end. Everyone is dead, the end.

This story could be such a great epic novel, something I can see being a movie or mini-series Masterpiece Theater style, it just needs to be fleshed out. I wanted to KNOW what was happening with the characters, how things were affecting them, other than the love sick letters between Mack and Inga.

Great read. The author wrote a story that was interesting and moved at a pace that kept me engaged. The characters were easy to invest in.

Difficult to go wrong with a WWII story. It seems to be an endless source of strong dramatic material. And this book actually does ok, considering. It creates likeable characters in the timeless vein of Romeo and Juliet (we’re talking opposite sides of the fence, not the suicidal tendencies) and places them in an impossible situation and then plays with readers’ emotions as the two lovers struggle to survive a terrible war. So to an extent this is an engaging story, but as a work of fiction it does have a strong amateur thing going on, from the cover and it’s short novel description (short novel is a novella, by definition, just say novella or, best case scenario, nothing, the page count will speak for itself) to that peculiar blandness of narration the amateur works sometimes have, where you have less of inner lives and more of the outward descriptions. Stylistic shortcomings aside, the plot itself is quite decent and it’s easy to appreciate the author’s choice to personify both sides of the conflict and deal with all the moral grey areas of something stereotypically represented in stark black and white. So for that alone and for how quick it was, it was a pretty decent read. The formatting of a Netgalley provided ARC left a lot to be desired, at least for the Kindle since it came in a weird PDF, so that was quite tedious, reader beware. Otherwise yeah, decent amateur obviously very well intentioned effort with the plot consistently outpacing execution. Thanks Netgalley.

Thank you to BooksGoSocial and NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Covering a well-known subject, but with a bit of a different angle, this book raises some profound questions: friend or foe, and the gray area in between, and the difficult decisions duty can force us to make. The author gave some good insight to life in Florida, well before it became the tourist mecca it is today. However, I found his prose difficult to read - the characterizations were skimpy, the transitions choppy and the description tended toward formulaic. In spite of being more of a novella than a novel, there were extraneous plot threads that added nothing and should have been dropped.

Overall, worth a read if you're interested in the time period - but more worth keeping an eye on the author to see how he develops in his next work.