The Plum Tree

October 15, 2012
Christine Bölz is living in a German village at the beginning of the Third Reich, where she and her family work as domestics for the Jewish Bauermans. Although from disparate backgrounds, a spark ignites between the teenage Christine and young Isaac Bauerman. When Isaac is arrested and taken to Dachau, Christine is left behind to sort through conflicting notions of loyalty, love, and nationality. She begins to follow the Jewish prisoners being marched to Dachau, sneaking them food, yet always keeping her distance from the German guards, not wanting “them to think that, just because she was a citizen of this nation run by madmen, she too was a Jew hater.” Christine helps Isaac make a daring escape, and hides him for some time in her family’s attic, but he is eventually found and sent back, along with Christine, to Dachau. Stories of WWII rarely look at the lives of the average German; Wiseman eschews the genre’s usual military conflicts in favor of the slow, inexorable pressure of daily life during wartime, lending an intimate and compelling poignancy to this intriguing debut. Agent: Michael Carr, Veritas Literary Agency.

December 1, 2012
In the calm before the storm, Christine Blz soaks in an idyllic morning in her small German town, basking in her new relationship with Isaac Bauerman, son of the wealthy Jewish family in whose house she works as a domestic servant. The glow of their new love is quickly tested as Hitler's armies begin to move, and restrictions are placed on interactions between Jews and non-Jews. Spanning the pre- to postwar years, the novel follows Christine and her family as they endure the hardships of war. Persevering through threats from the Gestapo and the horrors of Dachau, Christine keeps her hopes for a future with Isaac alive. Although the major story line is supposed to be the love story between Christine and Isaac, their relationship develops too quickly, and the level of commitment they have for one another seems out of sync. Considerable time and attention are devoted to quotidian activities of country life and to describing setting and scenery. Readers who like slower-paced sentimental novels set during WWII will enjoy this novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)