I’ve never encountered a work of fiction—or nonfiction, for that matter—that addresses the time, place, and issues Goldstone does in her young adult novel. Set in the last half of 1937 and early 1938 on an estate/horse farm near Königsberg in Germany’s northeasternmost province of East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the story focuses on sixteen-year-old Katya, who works as a domestic for the wealthy Richter family.

Katya’s family history is turbulent and traumatic. (Goldstone appears to have written about their experiences in her earlier novels for young people, which I haven’t read; they’re now out of print and very hard to come by.) From what I can piece together from tidbits dropped throughout this book, though, the family were once members of the land-owning peasant class in the Soviet Union, the “kulaks” so reviled by Joseph Stalin. Enemies of socialism for resisting the collectivization of their farms, these people were the focus of a 1929 Soviet government “liquidation” campaign. By 1934, the lands of these and other peasants opposed to Soviet objectives were confiscated, and the people deported (mostly to Siberia), arrested, or even executed. After time in Siberia, in the early 1930s, Katya and her orphaned siblings, who are ethnic Germans, ended up with relatives in East Prussia. As the story opens, Katya is employed as a maid along with another orphan, the beautiful, flirtatious, and partly Jewish Minna. The two friends work for Frau Richter, a generous and cultured woman of mixed Polish and German ancestry who treats them like family. Unlike her husband and her eldest son, the rakish Helmut, who have embraced the Führer’s ideas, the woman is worried about the direction in which Hitler is taking the country. She surreptitiously passes a novella by Thomas Mann to Katya, who hopes to one day become a writer herself, but suggests that the girl hide the slim book within the pages of Mein Kampf.

The wealthy Richters board and breed Trakehners, “noble, elegant” riding horses with “sculpted muscles.”(These horses were once popular with the military but are now used mostly for show jumping and dressage). At the time in which the book is set, however, when the Third Reich is busy restoring Germany to its former greatness, prominent Nazi officials interested in genetics and the entire breeding enterprise regularly visit the Richter estate. Horses that are imperfect are expected to be destroyed.

This, however, is not a book about horses per se. Rather, it concerns the human eugenics project of the regime, which officially began around 1935 when the “Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People” was passed. This law denied German citizens the right to marry people with hereditary or contagious diseases; those with one of nine designated hereditary conditions began to be sterilized.

The story opens with Katya and Minna being given a hot summer afternoon off to visit the resort town of Rauschen on the Baltic Sea. Helmut and his younger brother, David, accompany them. Katya is disappointed; she’d been looking forward to reading her book in solitude while her friend swam. Minna, however, is delighted. She loves male attention, and Helmut makes his interest clear. The couple swim, then beach comb for the amber that the area is renowned for. When they return, a distressed Minna insists that group make its way back to the estate. Katya resists. She’s been enjoying David’s company—has even fallen a little in love with him—so Minna goes alone. Not long after the trip to Rauschen, she leaves the Richter home for Vienna, ostensibly to pursue an acting career. Though saddened, Katya thinks it’s probably for the best. Minna is considered a “Mischling”—a mongrel— by the Nazis, and the estate is crawling with them. It’s the local Brownshirt hub.

The girls do correspond with each other, and Minna warns Katya against becoming too involved with David. It’s too late: the two have already grown close and often go off riding together. On one of their outings an accident occurs, and Katya learns that David suffers a hereditary condition. He has epilepsy. This changes the lives of both. Katya will also learn the true reason that Minna left the Richters’ estate. The secret of a locked desk drawer and the significance of the novel’s title will both be revealed.

Goldstone packs her book with a lot of details about German culture and pre-war Third-Reich life in general. The youth organization for girls aged 10 to 18, the Bund Deutsche Mädel (BDM), in particular, is highlighted—as the maid hired to replace Minna is actively involved in the group and is working to establish a local chapter of the “Faith and Beauty Society” (Glaube und Schönheit) for young women aged 17 to 21. When Katya visits her younger sisters who reside with their aunt in Königsberg, she discovers that they too are ardent members of the BDM and have absorbed a great deal of racist ideology. Not having encountered some of this information before, I have a hard time assessing if the average household in the Reich would have been as passionate about the cause as Herr Richter, his eldest son, and Gretchen the maid are shown to be. Would it have been typical, for example, for the pater familias and the mailman to greet the staff with a “Heil Hitler” instead of a “Good morning”? Did most families hang swastika flags outside their homes and portraits of the Führer within? I honestly don’t know. Goldstone doesn’t provide a bibliography/“for further reading” page at the end of the book.

I was not entirely convinced that domestic staff, even in a liberal German home like the Richters’, would have the degree of freedom that the Richters’ girls have. Gretchen, the maid who replaces Minna, appears to have more authority than Frau Richter herself. When there are Nazi girls’ league meetings that Gretchen must attend, she directs Katya to take her shifts. Characterization is occasionally inconsistent. And, finally, the writing struck me as forced at times: there are a few too many “golden” and “amber” moments in the early part of the book when Katya is falling in love with David. What is of interest, however, is the hereditary condition and its impact on two young people. Goldstone concludes in an open-ended way, but I believe a recently published novel will likely follow up on Katya’s story. ( )

I not only enjoyed this book but learned a great deal from it as well, in particular about Nazi indoctrination, the use of propaganda. and the resulting division created between factions of Germany’s population before the outbreak of the war. Gabriele Goldstone tells a fascinating story with realistic characters conflicted by romance, culture, and politics, and caught in dire circumstances beyond their control. I found myself speeding through pages to find out how it might all turn out. ( )