December 7, 2020
In this gripping inspirational, Sundin (Sunrise at Normandy) takes an affecting look at the rise of the Nazi Party and Jewish persecution in Germany through the eyes of an American journalist. In 1938 Munich, Evelyn Brand, a foreign correspondent with the American News Service, struggles in her male-dominated field and constantly challenges bureau chief George Norwood, who heavily edits her work. George asks his friend, Peter Lang, a PhD candidate teaching in Germany, to arrange benign interviews with his German college students. Peter believes Hitler has been good for the German people and its economy, a view devout Evelyn finds abhorrent. When Nazis begin attacking Jewish synagogues and Jewish businesses are boycotted, Peter’s outlook changes, as does his relationship with Evelyn. Using his contacts within the Nazi Party, Peter infiltrates meetings to gather information for Evelyn to report on. As they conspire to expose Hitler’s misdeeds, their lives are placed in jeopardy, and their plans to escape the country are thwarted. Sundin combines suspense and romance to great effect, leaving readers guessing the fate of Evelyn and Peter to the final pages. Inspirational fans who like high-octane action will enjoy this thrilling story.
Starred review from December 1, 2020
Evelyn Brand is trying desperately to break into the ranks of male-dominated international journalism and land a prime spot in Berlin before another world war breaks out. A sexist bureau chief keeps assigning her puff pieces in Munich, even though Brand is convinced there's a big story brewing. She is concerned about the way Jews are being treated in Germany and is determined to alert ordinary Americans to their plight. When she interviews an American living in Germany, Professor Peter Lang, he is convinced that 1930s Germany is well on the way to becoming a utopia, free from the lawlessness he observed a decade earlier. When Brand stirs up a hornet's nest, her passport is replaced with a Jewish one, branding her as subhuman to the Nazis--and Lang is the only person she trusts to help her escape. VERDICT Sundin (The Sky Above Us) is a must-buy for any Christian fiction collection, and her latest World War II tale positively crackles with tension. The characters struggle with changing sympathies while wrestling with the balance between freedom and order. Attentive readers may see parallels between the circumstances depicted in the book and the world today.--Christine Barth, Scott Cty. Lib. Syst., IA
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Starred review from January 1, 2021
American journalist Evelyn Brand is stationed in Germany and would do anything for a killer scoop, so she considers it an insult to be assigned a puff piece on German-language Harvard doctoral student Peter Lang. When Nazi officials take notice of Peter's niche accent expertise and recruit him for an assignment, however, he finds himself caught between committing treason to his country or being killed by the Gestapo. Evelyn's articles, stoked by Peter's knowledge of the Third Reich, start attracting the wrong kind of attention, and as Munich explodes into violence, her connection to Peter, dangerous in circumstance and love, may be their only chance at survival. Sundin's novels, including The Land beneath Us (2020) set the gold standard for historical war romance, and When Twilight Breaks is arguably her most brilliant and important work to date. In this frighteningly immersive dive into social and political daily life in Hitler's 1938 Germany, readers witness, through a young journalist's eyes, the incremental groundwork of extremism leading to genocide. Sundin masterfully combines action and attraction to generate multilayered thrills while exploring such themes as individual freedom versus the common good, gender and racial discrimination, and the polarization of viewpoints, which all have deep relevance today.
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