Things We Didn’t Say is an impressive debut. The well conceived story positions Green as a promising historical romance author.

Brilliant language student Johanna Berglund is forced home from university to work as a translator in a German PoW camp in Minnesota. The facility’s commander hoped she could mollify the unhappy townspeople as she’s also the mayor’s daughter. However, Johanna chafes at the disruption to her education.

The book is an epistolary novel, which means told only through written communication. The vast majority of the correspondence is between Johanna and her friend Peter Ito. Peter is a Japanese American working as an instructor at a military intelligence school. There’s also a series of letters to the editor of the local newspaper, written by a variety of town residents. Then there’s a collection of columns written by the inmates and translated by Johanna.

Most of the way through the book, I thought I saw the end coming. About three quarters of the way through, things take a very interesting turn. Peter is accused of being a defector and Johanna defends him, but is put at risk herself.

There’s a particular skillset involved in writing such a novel as Things We Didn’t Say. Green has handled the discipline extremely well. For lovers of the World War II era, this is a great book, written in an interesting manner, showing a side of the war that few others have tackled.

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