Customer Reviews

Camp Stalag

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For something this fanciful to work, every element, from the characters to the plot to the setting, has to contribute to the suspension of disbelief. None of this took place. The characters were cardboard, the plot meandered, the background was hazy. I will still try to slog through it just because I always try to finish books, but this one's going to take me a while. Sorry, didn't work for me.

A note on how I read, and how I review:

When they begin to bore me, or I stop believing in the world the writer is attempting to create, I stop reading and move on to something else. There are so many books, and so little time, that it's simply not worth spending time on books that aren't getting the job done. If the book isn't holding your interest, why bother?

I'm not sure where the previous reviewer is coming from, but I feel his/her comments are really misplaced, especially since he/she admits to not even having finished the book. Well, I just did and it really held me. I stayed up far too late to finish this and while I'm having to drink more coffee today to wake me up, I have no regrets. The characters are memorable, as is the story. Could it really happen, maybe not, but isn't that what we read fiction for? To escape to worlds that can't really exist? I was able to suspend my disbelief with no problems, finding the premise of a re-created German POW camp extremely fascinating. And for those of you who ask, "Why would anyone want to get dressed up in an old uniform and play war?", just ask that question of all those Civil War reenactors. They take it very seriously. Anyway, is this Hemingway? No, but that's not why I bought it. I wanted a unique and entertaining read and I got one. The writing is tight and keeps one turning the pages. Thumb's up!

In New Hampshire three hundred men are invited to spend two weeks in a replica of a WWII German POW camp; most of the chosen are the sons of soldiers who spent part of WW II in a Germen prison. Among the three-hundred, reporter Frank Murphy and his best friend Bill Seger are euphoric that they were selected.
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However, the American guests are "abducted" and taken to the camp under the guise of realism. They soon learn that this is not Hogan's Heroes or even Stalag 17 and that this cannot be New Hampshire. Kommandant Heinrich Koenig makes Camp Stalag the real thing as he brutally treats the chosen with scorn and abuse. Soon murders occur while prisoners try to escape from the hell Koenig has made of his "dream" to have one last victory before he dies. Murphy and Seger agree if they do nothing else they will take down Koenig.
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CAMP STALAG is a strange entertaining tale that uses reenactment to tell a twenty-first century WW II thriller. Frank and the Kommandant are interesting characters, both weird in their own way. Frank is hung up over his dad's war years as he glamorizes them while feeling strongly his lack of such experience lessens him as a man. Heinrich seems like a lunatic trying to revise history in a modern context. Thus these two antagonists in their crazy way keep Bill Walker's thriller from turning into a bad Hogan's Heroes' one joke plot, but instead make for a deep character study of two opponents reliving the past in the present.
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Harriet Klausner