March 20, 2024

An Enemy Like Me: A Novel
Teri M. Brown
Atmosphere Press (2023)
ISBN: 9781639885459 (paperback)

World War II Novel About German-American Family Wins Best Historical Fiction Award

Teri M. Brown’s novel, An Enemy Like Me, has won the Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Best Historical Fiction in this year’s Reader Views Literary Awards. That’s no surprise. It’s been racking up award after award, including First Place for Historical Fiction in the 2023 Royal Dragonfly Book Awards, First Place for Fiction in the Firebird Book Awards, and the BREW Fiction Book Excellence Award for Military Romance of the Year. And that is just a very short list of the accolades it is receiving.

An Enemy Like Me immediately captures the reader’s attention and makes them fall in love with the characters. It’s a multigenerational story with multiple viewpoints that capture the perspectives of Jacob Miller, his wife Bonnie, and their son William, who is four when his father goes off to fight in World War II for the United States. The narrative fills us in on the family’s history from 1917-2016, including the lives of Jacob and Bonnie’s parents and William’s children, but the main focus is on how Jacob and Bonnie meet, fall in love, have William, and then cope while Jacob is gone to fight for his country.

Jacob is patriotic, but that isn’t enough when you are German-American and the country you were born in is at war with the country where your parents were born. Because Jacob is American-born, he has more advantages than other German-Americans. He soon finds his German immigrant friends are being arrested for being suspected as Nazi sympathizers. Because Jacob is married and a father, he is not drafted, but he decides he must prove his love for his country by joining the service, despite his wife and mother’s protests. He might be German, but he cannot condone what the Nazis are doing to his ancestral land.

While much of the novel focuses on the war and the events leading up to it, a few chapters are set in 2016; these feature William reflecting on his childhood and coming to understand his deceased father better. These chapters are offset by the more frequent chapters from William’s perspective as a small child. I really appreciated William’s viewpoint since my own parents are almost the same age as William. It made me better understand what it was like to live through the war as a child who could not understand all the strain the adults around them must have felt. Ultimately, the 2016 William comes to understand things he could not as a child, and he learns to appreciate how the war changed him and both of his parents.

I really appreciated Brown’s research and all the details about World War II she inserted. These details not only made the characters’ experiences feel more real, but they added to my understanding of the war. For example, I did not know that only one member of Congress, Jeannette Rankin, voted against declaring war against Japan, stating, “As a woman, I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.” I also had no idea about the backlash against German-Americans during the war. I knew Japanese-Americans had been placed in concentration camps but not that Germans were also arrested, usually falsely, for being Nazi sympathizers. Jacob finds his friends being framed and arrested unjustly by his racist neighbors whose anger toward the Nazis makes them suspect and accuse anyone of German background. I also didn’t know a points system was used to determine which soldiers would return home and which would be required to stay in the service once the war was over.

Many parts of the novel made the characters truly come to life. I could relate to Bonnie’s questioning whether “Providence,” as President Truman says, is responsible for the war’s end and whether God was involved at all or it was all the work of humans. I also felt for Bonnie when she had a nervous breakdown over her fear that even though Germany had surrendered, Jacob could still die in the war against Japan. The most traumatic and hard-hitting part of the novel occurs when Jacob returns home. He cannot talk about the war because it is too horrible to share and difficult to explain to his family. But while the return is difficult for Jacob, and for Bonnie, who has to cope with his PTSD, it also brings some good. Jacob’s mother, who never liked Bonnie, becomes kinder. William changes because he has to live for two years without a father and then finds his father has changed when he returns home. But seventy years later, in 2016, William comes to terms with the past, understanding why his father couldn’t always provide him with what he needed as a young boy. The realization makes William reach out to his own son to try to improve their relationship.

While I liked all the main characters and could relate to them on some level, my favorite character was definitely Bonnie. I admired how innovative she was when she and Jacob first married. Knowing her family needed furniture and other items, she found a creative way to help support her family, even though pregnant in a time when a pregnant woman shouldn’t be seen in public and even a married woman was not supposed to work. I think everyone will admire the characters in this novel, feel for them in the difficult decisions they had to make, and appreciate the courage they showed to carry on from day to day under often extraordinary circumstances.

Ultimately, An Enemy Like Me raises questions about what it means to be a family, what it means to be American, what it means to be part of an ethnic group, whether there is such a thing as Providence, and how we can learn to be more tolerant and kind to one another.

Anyone who enjoys a novel with characters who feel like real people and who enjoys learning more about historical events, especially World War II, will be won over by the Miller family in Teri M. Brown’s An Enemy Like Me. It well deserves all the praise it is receiving.

For more information about Teri M. Brown and An Enemy Like Me, visit www.TeriMBrown.com.

— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and Odin’s Eye: A Marquette Time Travel Novel