BUYING ADVISORY: MS - OPTIONAL
APPEALS TO: SOME
13yo Max has been selected for a special spy mission back to Berlin. He's willing to do almost anything to try to find his parents, which is crazy because he's a Jewish boy. His talent with radios comes in handy, for soon he's working in a repair shop and meets the right person who gets him into the broadcasting center (The Funkhaus) where he demonstrates his electrical genius and lands a job there! Just like his English spy team trained him to do. But what if he goes too far? What if someone finds out who he really is, and where are his parents?
I loved this spy story, but I'm not sure the intended audience has the background knowledge to understand what's really going on - Gidwitz puts Max in some remarkable situations - an audience with Goebbels, captured by German agents, and then remarkably gets away. No one seems to take Max for the child he still is. I wasn't too keen on all the political instruction and the deep looks into Nazi propaganda that Max (and the readers) were getting. I kept asking myself "does a 12yo reader really need to know all this?" It was a fascinating adult read, but I'm not sure it will be as exciting as "Max in the House of Spies" was. The magical realism is still there as well, the kobold and the dybbuk are still with him, adding a lot of the necessary comic relief. Gidwitz has included extensive author notes indicating who is real and who isn't and more info about the reals, as well as an annotated bibliography. Max is German and Jewish - nearly all the other characters were also German
Lisa Librarian
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