Review: Not Much Here
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 2, 2013
I need to reexamine my life and sincerely make an effort to discount the stars on ratings of discounted Kindle books.  There is really nothing to recommend this book.  The plot is almost not there.  The characters are overly predictable.  The coincidences to end the book are so ridiculous as to be infantile.  The writing is very basic and uninteresting.Maggie is an Irish-American in Germany to study.  She falls in love with a German young man so stays.  She then gets a job in the government broadcasting system - the radio propaganda.  She hates England so much as an Irishman she is pro-German and produces then narrates the broadcasts to England and then America.  At the same time, Erich, an American undercover spy in the Embassy is trying to "recruit" her.  None of the German atrocities seem to bother her until she hears third hand that at a home for disabled children 14 Jewish children were exterminated.  Since she has a disabled sister (we learn in one clause in one sentence), this puts her over the top and she succumbs to Erich's entreaties and starts spying for America.  All the while she continues broadcasting like an American Tokyo Rose.  All of that is told in a rather bland fashion through the majority of the book.  Her wonderful boyfriend, of course, comes back from the fighting a changed man and is suddenly the typical Aryan violent domineering male.She is then caught by the Gestapo after some truly amateurish spycraft is uncovered by another former German friend who oh so surprisingly turned bad guy Gestapo.  She is freed by a fortuitous bombing and then floats through Germany and France as a refugee in about ten pages where she reunites with everyone in the book.There were elements of this book that could have been good, but Maggie, as portrayed, is either incredibly, stupid, stupendously naive, or, as I felt, just a lousily drawn character.  What should have been tension filled angst of promoting the German government she knew had run amok, she was proud of her advancement in the propaganda machine while at the same time spying, seemingly without reason or cause.This was a disappointment. There are so many good WWII novels, this one should be passed.