Christian Strayhorn Spence

General Pershing's Other Daughter Christian Strayhorn Spence

"It was on March 12, 1938 that Nazi jackboots stormed their way through my neighborhood and over the innocent pieces left of my soul. I asked myself, do humans set up the system of normal? If they do, are genocide and cruelty normal? Maybe the nature of man was evil. Maybe Hitler was right. Could I be the one who was wrong?" Orphaned at eight years old, brilliant and obsessive Julia Josephine Patterson finds herself living with her godfather in Vienna at the brink of World War II. Obsessed with honoring her namesake, John Joseph Pershing who tragically lost his own daughters, Julia uses old family letters and her American ideals to guide her quest to make her father and General Pershing proud. While trying to find herself in a world turning to evil, Julia decides to save one unsuspecting victim of Nazi terror at a time. Coming to grips with right and wrong, Julia is forced to question everyone in her life, leading her to discover the secrets her parents left behind. In the process of trying to save the world, she must fight her own demons and find herself, while being forced to hide her true intentions from the world. General Pershing?s Other Daughter is a 76,000-word work of historical fiction set on the cobblestone streets of World War II Austria. The story follows Julia, an obsessive-compulsive, idealistic, sarcastic, yet genius American orphan sent to live in Austria during Adolph Hitler?s rise to power. Focusing on Austria, an often forgotten player in the Second World War in contemporary fiction, General Pershing?s Other Daughter seizes a topic of high interest (the Nazi takeover of Europe) from a new perspective. Character driven, General Pershing?s Other Daughter explores the challenges of a girl learning to embrace, yet struggling to overcome, being raised solely by broken men and concerned with books and justice more than beauty and compliance.