Daughter of the Reich

DEBUT English author Fein’s first novel takes place in 1930s Leipzig, Germany. When Hetty Heinrich is eight, she’s saved from drowning by a neighbor boy. He becomes her hero—but then Walter is revealed by her schoolteacher to be a Jew and expelled from the school. Hetty and her family move from their modest dwelling to a fine, large house, and only gradually does she understand that her father used his Nazi party connections to acquire this from the former occupants. At first Hetty is a good little subject of Adolf Hitler and her family is deeply involved in the party poltics, although she wants to be a doctor, which does not fit the perfect frau model. As a high party member, she has direct experience of the inhumanity, rising violence, and hatred wrought by the Nazis, which soon shatters her belief in her position in the Reich and opens her eyes to what is truly happening.