2015 Carol award finalist!
Increasingly wary of her father’s genetic research, Rachel Kramer has determined that this trip with him to Germany—in the summer of 1939—will be her last. But a cryptic letter from her estranged friend, begging Rachel for help, changes everything. Married to SS officer Gerhardt Schlick, Kristine sees the dark tides turning and fears her husband views their daughter, Amelie, deaf since birth, as a blight on his Aryan bloodline.
Once courted by Schlick, Rachel knows he’s as dangerous as the swastikas that hang like ebony spiders from every government building in Berlin. She fears her father’s files may hold answers about Hitler’s plans for others, like Amelie, whom the regime deems “unworthy of life.” She risks searching his classified documents only to uncover shocking secrets about her own history and a family she’s never known.
Now hunted by the SS, Rachel turns to Jason Young—a driven, disarming American journalist and unlikely ally—who connects her to the resistance and to controversial theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Forced into hiding, Rachel’s every ideal is challenged as she and Jason walk a knife’s edge, risking their lives—and asking others to do the same—for those they barely know but come to love.
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Sexual Content - 1/5
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Violence - 2/5
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Language - 1/5
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Drugs and Alcohol - 1/5
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Summary
Saving Amelie is set during the earliest years of WW2 in Germany. In fact, with the exception of the epilogue, the whole of the plot is carried out prior to the United States entry into the war. As one who has read and researched much about Hitler\'s takeover of Germany and the Nazis\' atrocities against Jews, gypsies, the elderly, the handicapped, and others who would mar their picture of Aryan perfection, I am impressed with the Cathy Gohlke\'s very thorough research for this novel. Her main focus in the telling of this story is how eugenics played a part in the evil that pervaded Germany at the hand of Hitler and his cohorts. But she didn\'t lay the blame all at Hitler\'s feet. She calls all to account for their inaction, for their turning a blind eye, for their complicity in the crimes against those who were Hitler\'s prey. Eugenics, the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics, was not solely a German invention. Many across the globe were studying eugenics and involved in putting its principles to work. Ms. Gohlke reveals in her novel that there were those in the U. S. involved. I think she does us all a great service to show us, even through a fictionalized account, the far-reaching results that serious eugenics principles applied can cause. The protagonist, Rachel Kramer is unwittingly part of an eugenics program, her father being a significant American eugenics researcher. As most of us can be when we don\'t think through the logical outcome of things like eugenics, she found herself being faced with the horrors of eugenics applied. Ms. Gohlke masterfully crafted a narrative that revealed how eugenics was the root-cause of many of the atrocities of Hitler\'s Germany. I like how she included Dietrich Bonhoeffer in her story, while also weaving into a significant role, the town and people of Oberammergau, Germany, famous for their performance every ten years of the Passion Play of Christ. This is a book worthy of your time. I was left thinking about its message for days after I finished--just like a quality read should.
Voilence : We're talking Nazis here…the violence depicted could be much, much worse.
Language: What crude language there is, which isn't much, comes from the mouth of a Nazi SS
Sexual: There are depictions of inappropriate sexual encounters, but theses depictions are done in such a way that the reader gets the idea of what happened without gratuitous details
Drug & Alcohol: