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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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