Ingeborg Lauterstein has known both the safety and danger she describes in her novels. From the cozy complexity of her early childhood Vienna, jokes in the wine gardens, grand family gatherings, nostalgia for the good old Kaiser days, luxuriant feasts, music and dance, to the trauma of the annexation and war. Loneliness and hiding under beds in the dark. All hell breaking lose, being stalked. Ingeborg has not lost her sense of humor. She is witty with a slight foreign accent in several languages and has the advantage of being both at home and a stranger in the New World and the Old, and of course the worlds she creates.

Another aspect of Lauterstein's achievement is the subtle way in which a very realistic cast of characters acquire symbolic weight...Edward Butcher, Newsday

About Shoreland

Shoreland depicts authority gone mad with it's own rhetoric. A four-year old waves to a big black car on a dusty road and is torn away from her school-girl mother, as she becomes one of the two hundred and fifty thousand blond children Nazis stole to replenish the Master Race. The little ones had to stay healthy, blond and follow certain crazy standards of measurements, to perpetuate perfection in a Thousand Year Reich. Children were graded as valuable or not valuable. Sickly imperfect children had to be discarded as worthless.

Shoreland is a town where nothing much happens and everyone knows about it, but no one knows that Liz had been one of those children. Now while she is writing her forbidden memoirs for publication, the retrospect of Nazi doctors with their branding iron and needles and drug experiments on helpless children, give her a horrific awareness of  kids she loves, with tatoos, piercings, experimenting on themselves with drugs. Could this not be mutilating the mind? How about medications psychiatrists prescribe for her husband? The tragedy in comic characters and the comedy in the midst of tragedy links the past with the present the way the sea links the old world with the new.