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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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