Orphan Monster Spy

January 1, 2018
Killeen’s harrowing debut opens in August 1939, just after a 15-year-old Jewish girl named Sarah and her mother drive through a Nazi checkpoint in a German town. Sarah’s mother dies in the crash, but Sarah evades capture thanks to Helmut Haller, aka Captain Jeremy Floyd, a British spy. Jeremy is attempting to prevent one of Hitler’s scientists, Hans Schäfer, from building a nuclear bomb. He offers to help Sarah escape Germany, but she insists on joining his campaign. Posing as Haller’s niece Ursula, Sarah enrolls at Rothenstadt, a Nazi boarding school. Her mission—befriending Schäfer’s daughter, Elsa—proves more dangerous than either she or Jeremy imagined. Despite a dynamite premise, dizzyingly high stakes, and some devastating moments, Killeen’s tale falls short of its potential. While the story’s adult characters are complex and realistically flawed, Rothenstadt’s residents read like mean-girl caricatures, and the frequency with which the intelligent, empathetic Sarah refers to herself as a dumme Schlampe (“stupid bitch”) is off-putting and out of character. The book starts strong and ends with a bang, but the muddy middle highlights the paucity of plot. Ages 12–up. Agent: Molly Ker Hawn, Bent Agency.

January 1, 2018
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)

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January 1, 2018
Grades 9-12 In 1939 Germany, 15-year-old Sarah and her mother try to escape to Switzerland, but her mother is killed at a checkpoint. Blonde, blue-eyed, and a talented gymnast, Sarah has been trained by her actress mother to assume whatever identity she needs to protect herself, because she is a Jew. Then Sarah meets a mysterious man at the train station who turns out to be a British spy. Captain Floyd takes Sarah under his protection, but he sends her on a mission: infiltrate a boarding school for daughters of top Nazi officers, befriend the daughter of a scientist, and steal the blueprints for a bomb. There's a plot twist around every corner, slow reveals of Sarah's past, and multiple cinematic moments, including a harrowing race through the forest. German phrases (translated and well-placed in context) add verisimilitude to the narrative. Fast-paced, cleverly constructed, and with references to real-life heroes, heroines, and villains, this promising debut will appeal to fans of historical fiction and spy stories.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)