Thrills, action, and the moral certainty of fighting Nazis drive this thriller.
A girl spy in Nazi-occupied France contends with a dastardly Nazi plot as well as treason within the Allied ranks.
Sixteen-year-old Lucie, heartbroken at her beloved brother's death in action, sneaks away from home to join the Women's Army Corps. The French-speaking, white Baltimore native is promptly (if implausibly) recruited into Covert Ops, an all-female espionage division. Though tops in her class during training, Lucie struggles in the field, where the job of killing her targets after extracting all necessary information makes her too squeamish to excel. Perhaps she can please her irritable commander with her few extracted rumors of the dreadful and mysterious Operation Zerfall. Before Lucie learns anything further, Covert Ops dissolves into chaos. Despite her junior status, Lucie's sent to interrogate a defecting Nazi—about Operation Zerfall. A cinematic combat sequence later (evoking more Kill Bill than another girl-spies-in-occupied-France novel, Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity, 2012), and Lucie has all the information Covert Ops needs. But trusting the wrong person drags Lucie into a dire situation that could turn the tide of the war for Germany. Characterization is thin, but secondary characters of color provide authentic diversity. The drama builds through interrogations, explosions, shoe daggers, and Nazi mad science; the entertaining, historically genuine (though often inaccurately depicted) James Bond gadgets and weapons keep pages turning.
Thrills, action, and the moral certainty of fighting Nazis drive this thriller. (Historical thriller. 12-14)Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-80127-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Without that frame, this would have been a fine addition to the wacked-out summer-camp subgenre.
Survival camp? How can you not have bad feelings about that?
Sixteen-year-old nerd (or geek, but not dork) Henry Lambert has no desire to go to Strongwoods Survival Camp. His father thinks it might help Henry man up and free him of some of his odd phobias. Randy, Henry’s best friend since kindergarten, is excited at the prospect of going thanks to the camp’s promotional YouTube video, so Henry relents. When they arrive at the shabby camp in the middle of nowhere and meet the possibly insane counselor (and only staff member), Max, Henry’s bad feelings multiply. Max tries to train his five campers with a combination of carrot and stick, but the boys are not athletes, let alone survivalists. When a trio of gangsters drops in on the camp Games to try to collect the debt owed by the owner, the boys suddenly have to put their skills to the test. Too bad they don’t have any—at all. Strand’s summer-camp farce is peopled with sarcastic losers who’re chatty and wry. It’s often funny, and the gags turn in unexpected directions and would do Saturday Night Live skits proud. However, the story’s flow is hampered by an unnecessary and completely unfunny frame that takes place during the premier of the movie the boys make of their experience. The repeated intrusions bring the narrative to a screeching halt.
Without that frame, this would have been a fine addition to the wacked-out summer-camp subgenre. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8455-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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