I felt a need to review the book after hearing from several individuals how much they liked it, though they called it rather light. They were surprised by my dislike of the book, and amazed by what I had to say about it.

Young attempted to bring alive a period in My Enemy's Cradle that is fairly recent history, namely the war years of 1939-45. It appears she forgot that there are still people alive who can detect the major fault lines in her potentially earthshaking work. Few people have dealt with the subject she chose from the Hitler regime's long list of atrocities; her subject is the somewhat murky Lebensborn (Source of Life) homes story. These homes became breeding stations for so-called perfect Aryan children. The young mothers of these pure children had to be perfect blue-eyed, blonde specimens, although they did not have to be German. Preferably the fathers had to be Germans—though not necessarily—and members of the SS, the elite soldiers of the German army. What few people now know is that there were Dutch, French and Norwegian soldiers among others, who served in the SS, and so were suitable studs for these breeding farms.

This is a subject that must be treated with care for there are still women alive who were caught up in this cruelly idiotic and misguided scheme; even more so, children are very much still alive who were born in these homes, often unaware of the identity of either their mother or father. Although meticulous records had been kept at the various homes the leadership ordered them destroyed to remove incriminating evidence at war's end. The Nazis knew that the world had no sympathy for these absurd experiments. Sadly, this left many children without an identity.

While these children received the best of food available during the war years, many ended up autistic or mentally damaged and physically underdeveloped. They lacked mental or physical stimuli in these homes while awaiting adoption by suitably Aryan families. Few of the birth mothers kept their babies, either because of shame for having an illegitimate child, or because they were perceived as unsuitable for keeping the child. Only if the fathers agreed to marry them or to adopt the babies did the mothers hold onto these children.

So much for the historic background to Young's My Enemy's Cradle. As for the background of the novelist, we only know she received her BA from Marietta College in the small Ohio town of Marietta, that she lives in Cape Cod and is known for her children's books. Just why she pick such a prickly subject as the Lebensborn movement, and what made her choose to place much of the action in Holland, is unrevealed.

When one thinks of a really successful recent historic fiction novelist, to mind comes Clare Clark and her wonderful books about London's past. Now, here is an author who understands her subject, in part perhaps, because London is her town. But there is more to it. Clark makes no naive assumptions, truly understands what goes on not just in the period about which she writes, but what goes on in the minds of her characters. They are flesh and blood. The same thing can be said about the late Belinda Starling's only book, The Journal of Dora Damage, despite its faults. As for capturing the claustrophobic German atmosphere, in this case post-war, Graham Greene and John Le Carré come to mind. One does not get this feeling from Young's characters, nor the background of the two countries involved in her tale. But, worst of all, Young creates situations in her books that could not have happened, or that leave huge gaps over which we can't jump. The fault lines are too deep.

The protagonist of the novel is Cryla, a girl of part Catholic Dutch, part Jewish Polish background. Her father sent her in 1936 from Lodz in Poland to her Dutch relatives because he felt she would be safe from Nazi persecution. It seems doubtful that anyone in Poland thought in 1936 that Poland would be a victim of Nazi aggression. Hitler had not yet started his annexation program. Besides, that year, in which Germany hosted the Olympic Games (Winter & Summer), his regime acted peculiarly humane towards its fellow Jewish citizens in an attempt to pull the wool over the world's eyes, in which it partially succeeded.

The novel begins in September 1941, by which time Poland, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, France and Greece had been invaded, England had been bombed, and Europe was in chaos. That year even Russia, a German ally, had been attacked by Hitler. Yet Young's story echoes none of this chaos. Cryla and her cousin, Anneke seem to be barely touched or be aware of what is going on in the world, despite some comments about the bombing of Rotterdam.

Even though the story begins with the ominous news that the Nuremberg laws are now also being instituted in Holland, meaning that the lives of Jews will be restricted, Young fails to capture its implications. At the same time, Isaac, one of Cryla's Jewish friends, knows exactly how many Jews have been killed in the Ukraine and other places by listening to the BBC. This is utterly unbelievable. No one really knew at that point the extent of the victimization and the numbers of the Jews killed in the East. Young put herself there on a pretty slippery slope. Besides, almost from the beginning of the war the connection between Britain and the Dutch underground was compromised because the leader of the Dutch underground in Britain refused to believe that the Germans knew what he planned. Agents continued to be parachuted into Holland, but none of them were ever heard of again because they were immediately captured.

Without giving away too much of the story, it needs to be said that eventually Cryla will take the place of Anneke, who dies of a self-inflicted abortion. Cryla, as Anneke—they look very much alike—takes her cousin's place in a Lebensborn home. Ostensibly she was to have been sent to a Dutch home at Nijmegen in the most easterly part of Holland, but instead she is sent to Heim Hochland, near Steinhörigen, not far from Munich. Quite rightly, Young tells us that the Nijmegen home had not been built at the time—actually it was never built. What she fails to reveal is that the home to which Cryla/Anneke is taken, was the original home created in 1935 by Himmler, and was considered the elite of all of the Lebensborn homes.

One questions the choice because there were other homes much closer to Holland, such as one in the area of Liege in Belgium. The drive to Munich in those days would have taken several days, yet Young fails to indicate any sense of time—it would have meant at least one over-night stay somewhere. No one, not even soldiers, would have dared to drive through the night because of wartime blackout conditions, which meant no car headlights. There is also a lack of indication of the supposed route, other than that they followed the Rhine, but by the time they came to Wiesbaden, the Rhine would have been left behind. What about such places as Stuttgart and Augsburg, both of which would have had to be on the route as they headed further southeast?

How was it possible for Cryla/Anneke to believe that she could write to a Jew in Holland and expect a letter back? How could the novel's writer promulgate the idea the Jews could flee Holland to England via fishing vessels? Is she even aware of not only the German warship traffic along the coast at the time, but the distance from Holland to the English coast? How could Cryla/Anneke purchase bakery goods without ration coupons? How could she possibly make a long distance call from a German phone booth to occupied Holland? Even within Germany at the time long distance calls were difficult to make, let alone from a phone booth to an occupied country. The author also fails to capture the oppressive German atmosphere, she used unsuitable words, one of which is the frequently used 'jeep'. Germans had no Jeeps, they drove Kübelsitzwagen, or often jokingly referred to as Kürbiswagen (pumpkin cars) or just Kübel, which looked nothing like a Jeep. Few of them were ever seen within Germany as they were intended for the Russian and African fronts. Only about 52,000 were produced as opposed to close to 650,000 Jeeps by the Americans.

Cryla is forced to flee the home when a nosy fellow inmate discovers her Jewish background. The man who helps her to flee, the supposed father of her child, is a soldier, who takes her on back roads to near Nijmegen in an all-night drive from the Munich area. Are we really to believe this? And finally, one has to wonder what the author thought when she created her last chapter? In 1947 Germany was still very much a country divided into zones, and movement from one to the other was difficult. One can only shake ones head over Cryla's supposed trip from England to Munich (American Zone) to the area around Hamburg (British Zone). If Cryla really made it to England in 1942 with a newly-born baby—which is highly questionable—how did she get papers as a Polish national to travel to Germany in 1947, and how did she find the funds? Young's research somehow failed her here badly. Without trying to give away too much, let it be said the novel's final scene comes from fairytales—very romantic ones—but has nothing to do with reality. No German could have sailed his boat to some palm tree-studded island at that time, and no German soldier guilty of treason would have been lucky enough to survive.

What one ends up with is a terrible feeling that the author is naive, and that she had editors who failed to guide her in the right direction. Somehow, one gets a sense that we have failed in our education system to teach history, the meaning of the holocaust, and what Hitler's regime really stood for. Worse, it seems editors no longer ask their authors to substantiate facts, even if these are presented in fiction. As a reviewer I am dismayed.