Eighteen-year-old Josephine Marzynski has had the best opera training available in Boston, but to advance in her art, she must go to Berlin. “I wanted to learn from the best in the world,” she narrates, and “the best were German.” Normally, it would not be a problem for Josephine to study in her mother’s native land, but the year is 1916, and Germany is at war with America’s closest allies. Simply by being an American in Germany, Josephine invites suspicions that she’s a spy. She stays with childhood friends of her mother’s, the Müllers, and she has her cousin Jack Meyers with her to help navigate the cultural divide. Josephine finds herself simultaneously seduced and alienated by the culture of Berlin, the city of her operatic dreams, and by Gustav von Lüben, a captain in the German army whose lungs are permanently damaged from poison gas. She’s just beginning to come to terms with the contradictions of her situation when, on April 6, 1917, the thing she most dreads comes to pass: The United States declares war on Germany. Josephine decides to abandon her studies and leave Germany as soon as possible, but getting back to America turns out to be much harder than she expected. As Daly explains in her author’s note, the novel is a fictionalization of a memoir (ghostwritten by Daly’s own grandfather) of the historical Josephine Marzynski. Perhaps for this reason, a slightly distracting sense of self-awareness characterizes Josephine’s narration, as though she realizes capital-H history is unfolding around her: “I held his gaze, my frustration boiling over. ‘Gustav, I know my country, and we wouldn’t have entered this war without cause. If you think we’ll quit before finishing the job, then you don’t know us at all.’” Even so, the novel documents a fascinating period of history from an intriguing perspective.