Orphan Monster Spy
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3.8 • 18 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Her name is Sarah. She’s blonde, blue-eyed, and Jewish in 1939 Germany. And her act of resistance is about to change the world.
“Deeply disturbing and chillingly good.”—Elizabeth Wein, New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Verity
“Inglourious Basterds meets Mean Girls.”—The Hollywood Reporter
She’s a liar. A thief. And the Nazi’s worst nightmare.
Sarah’s actress mother spent years teaching her how to become someone else. Now her mother is dead and Sarah is hiding in plain sight among the daughters of the Nazi elite. A brilliant con artist, she’s out to befriend the daughter of an important scientist and get her hands on the bomb blueprints in his heavily guarded manor.
The more deeply embedded she becomes in this world of monsters, the graver the danger. But she’s determined to get her revenge on them all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Sch fer, 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 Sch fer'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.
