by Matt Killeen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2018
A powerful, bleak, and penetrating portrait of an isolated young woman excelling in unimaginable danger
A half-Jewish girl in Nazi Germany passes up a chance to escape in favor of the opportunity to screw with Nazis.
Sarah’s mother is shot as they try to flee, but a stranger in a dark warehouse gives the bleeding, grieving Sarah good advice to avoid detection. When Sarah later sees the stranger being harassed by the police, she interrupts her own planned escape to save him. Her new ally, she learns, is a British spy, and she defies his attempt to help her to freedom. Wouldn’t it be better to stay and hurt the Nazis? Fifteen-year-old blonde Sarah looks not only Aryan but young: she’s as small as an 11-year-old. Home-schooled by her mother (who was an actress before the Nuremberg Laws left her unemployed, alcoholic, and abusive), Sarah’s skilled at playacting and languages. She’s even turned her gymnastics experience into a kind of parkour to avoid anti-Semitic violence and steal food. In other words, she’s a perfect spy. Disguised as the 13-year-old daughter of a Nazi official, she infiltrates an elite school. If she can befriend one of her classmates, the daughter of a nuclear physicist, she might save the Allies. Killeen’s thriller is cold, exciting, and well-paced, but its major plot point—the physicist’s independent development of a superweapon—is so James Bond it undercuts the real-world horror that was the Holocaust. Sarah’s coming-of-age and psychological crisis are so well-drawn, however, that the plot’s flaws are forgivable.
A powerful, bleak, and penetrating portrait of an isolated young woman excelling in unimaginable danger . (Historical thriller. 13-16)Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-47873-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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by Matt Killeen
by David Massey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 2014
Despite this book’s currency, Allan Stratton’s Chanda’s War (2008) remains a far better fictional treatment of the tragedy...
What’s meant to be a symbolic round-the-world sail goes horribly off course when the yacht and its teenage crew, four disabled British veterans of the Middle East conflict and two able-bodied assistants, is boarded off Tanzania by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Present-tense narrator Rio, a Brit of Jamaican and Sikh descent, is one of the assistants. A potential Olympic sailor, she blunders into a psychodynamic she doesn’t fully understand, particularly the tension between charismatic Ash, who walks on two prosthetic legs, and his gorgeous girlfriend, the other assistant. But they are not on the boat for long. Led by the brutal (fictional) second-in-command to Joseph Kony himself, a band of mostly child soldiers manhandles the teens across Tanzania and into the Congolese jungle. Rio and Ash’s instant attraction fuels a puerile, almost embarrassing romantic subplot that stretches out along the bitter miles. Devoutly religious diabetic Izzy provides both tension—what happens when the insulin runs out?—and conscience, counseling the others to love their child captors. A creepy, witch-doctor–like LRA flunky seems painfully gratuitous, there to provide an extra fillip of exoticism—as though the machete-wielding children, including the dead-eyed girl Rio calls the Empty Child, aren’t horror enough. Contrivances and coincidences further undermine the tale.
Despite this book’s currency, Allan Stratton’s Chanda’s War (2008) remains a far better fictional treatment of the tragedy of child soldiers. (Adventure. 14-16)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-545-66128-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicken House/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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by Anne Blankman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2015
Suspenseful and clever, intertwining historical truth with action-packed shootouts.
A former intimate of Adolf Hitler returns to prewar Germany to save her beloved, all while fighting the rising power of the Nazi Party.
In this sequel to Prisoner of Night and Fog (2014), 18-year-old Gretchen returns to her native land in 1933, as the Nazis become ever more firmly entrenched in German politics. Gretchen and her Jewish beau, Daniel, seek the truth about the (real-life) Reichstag fire in order to discredit Hitler and the National Socialists. If only they can prove Hitler is lying about the arsonists, surely they can prevent him from gaining a stranglehold on German politics. The tight interweaving of Gretchen's journey with historical events lends a sense of the genuine—and results in the fascinating experience of following a quest readers know is doomed to fail. As Gretchen winds ever closer to the inevitable confrontation with her formerly loving "Uncle Dolf," it becomes increasingly unclear what she can salvage from the rising horror of Nazism. Mixed in with the bleak reality are adventure-novel goodies to maintain the pace: organized crime, prostitution and cocaine. Gretchen's too inwardly focused to see danger in Hitler's rise beyond the risk to herself and her friends, but Daniel provides rare if vital perspective.
Suspenseful and clever, intertwining historical truth with action-packed shootouts. (author’s note, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-227884-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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