From School Library Journal
Grade 6-8-Hannes Keller has a disability that impedes his speech and causes him to walk with the assistance of a crutch. He is studying the Third Reich in history class and dreams day and night, much to his parents' concern, of 1930s Germany, when people with disabilities were taken to psychiatric institutions and later killed under Operation T4-"elimination of lives not worth living." In these dreams he becomes friendly with a classmate, Hilde Rosenbaum, who does not return to school one day, and hears his father agree to put him in a "home," thus changing their relationship in the present. Many of the sentences are choppy and the paragraphs do not lead into one another-perhaps attempting free association, as in a dream sequence, but the device doesn't work well in this book. It is often difficult to determine whether Hannes is dreaming or not and most of the characters exist primarily in his imagination, which he cannot separate from reality. The final chapters concerning the Third Reich are informative, but come too late.
Delia Fritz, Mercersburg Academy, PACopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Gr. 5-8. Translated from the German, this striking story is narrated by a boy who walks, talks, and stands only with great difficulty. Though he lives in modern Germany, he repeatedly travels back in time to the 1930s through waking dreams that are both disturbing and compelling. In the dream world, he becomes a similarly disabled boy named Hanne, who is taunted by bullying classmates and derided by a Nazi teacher. Hanne also watches as the Gestapo seizes a different teacher who is Jewish. Finally, his own father betrays him, signing papers that allow the Nazis to remove Hanne because of his physical disabilities. In the last chapter, the narrator reflects that if he had been conceived more recently, he might never have been born, due to genetic testing. Several pages at the end of the book offer background information about the Third Reich and its "elimination of lives not worth living." The issues that are woven into this tightly constructed novel will inspire many discussions on a stream of topics: Germany in the 1930s, attitudes toward disabilities, bullying, physical versus moral defects, and the value of life. A short, quiet, yet memorable, novel that challenges its audience with questions worth asking.
Carolyn PhelanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
