An oddball curio, but the teen angst enhances its far-fetched premise.
In this thriller, a volatile teenager living in a nationalistic German community finds evidence that he’s part of a secret experiment that aims to re-create Adolf Hitler.
High schooler and first-person narrator Addie dwells in Upper Reichfield, Pennsylvania—a strange, closed-off community that no one ever seems to leave. Teutonic sitcoms, such as Leave It to Hauser, air on television, and classes teach propagandistic lessons about German/Nordic cultural supremacy. Addie works a bleak customs-office job, but he’s passionate about his paintings—and about leading his soccer team to victory against the so-called “lowlies” of a rival school from a poorer neighborhood. He’s courted by a blonde beauty named Ava, but he finds himself attracted to a biracial Lower Reichfield player named Shaylee. Her associates are involved in an art-forgery scheme, so they take advantage of Addie’s talents. Later, he and Shaylee discover a document from the late 1990s, stuffed in a drain, that indicates that Addie is actually a clone of an infamous tyrant named Hitler, who’s absent from Addie’s school history lessons. It also appears that everything around Addie is an elaborate setup to psychologically mold him into that villain of old. Will the petulant protagonist’s innate sense of rebellion make him a good guy despite his DNA? Readers who’ve ever wondered how a sequel to Ira Levin’s 1976 bestseller, The Boys from Brazil, might go will be the ideal readership for Ludwig’s (Planet of the Orb Trees, 2017) latest novel. It seems to be aimed at the YA market despite some R-rated elements, including raw language, a scene involving oral sex, and a violent Götterdämmerung climax. The tone hits a range of notes between Suzanne Collins’ 2010 book, Mockingjay, and Mel Brooks’ 1967 film, The Producers. Still, it’s striking and disconcerting when Ludwig makes a young, malfunctioning pseudo-neo-fascist speak in a voice not unlike Holden Caulfield’s. Even before the book tips its hand as sci-fi, it feels akin to past fabulist/surreal fiction, such as Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum (1959), which tried to interpret Nazism in avant-garde terms.
An oddball curio, but the teen angst enhances its far-fetched premise.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9950441-9-7
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Heartlab Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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