THE WORLD AT MIDNIGHT

The Brashares siblings conclude their “what if the Nazis won” speculative middle-grade trilogy.

This third volume has an improvisational, overstuffed feel, as if the original arc were intended to extend over several more volumes, but the plot was still being worked out. In the 2023 Nazi colony of Westfallen, Henry, Frances, and Lukas mine comic books for historical details to communicate via their magic radio with Alice, Lawrence, and Artie in 1944 America. They desperately hope to reverse their error that caused the Allies to lose World War II. In between their comic book missions, Lawrence studies for a spelling bee in 1944, Alice travels through the magic well to 2023, where Lukas plays baseball and tries to protect Nina, a fellow Jewish kid, from being bused to a forced-labor camp along with all the other Jewish 13-year-olds. In this outing, Lukas and Artie join Henry and Alice in sharing the narration in brief bursts, which are expertly interleaved to pull readers along. It’s particularly critical that readers get a glimpse of Lukas’ interiority, as it is he who finally names the Holocaust and at last reflects on what the alternate-timeline Nazi victory must have meant for postwar Europe. These sobering reflections, just a few paragraphs long, do not materially affect the story’s breakneck pace or its thriller vibe, but they are welcome. Alice, Artie, and Frances are white. Lawrence is Black, and Henry is biracial, Black and white.

A chaotic resolution.