Another Green World

Ross King

It's fitting that Grant, one of fantasy literature's most eloquent and erudite practitioners, should tackle the role played by mythmaking in politics and war. This happens to be the specialty of one of the novel's more repellent characters, a Nazi named Professor Cheruski. Asked by Heinrich Himmler about the key to understanding a people -- "to knowing how they think, why they choose to act or not to act in a given situation" -- Cheruski answers: "It is their literature, Herr Reichsführer. The stories they tell of themselves. . . . The tales that seem to have sprung from the depths of their folk-soul." Nazism could never have found such a ready purchase had the Germans not become, as one character observes, "drunk on their own mythology."
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

This debut novel from Maine journalist Grant, 54, opens in 1944, as minor Roosevelt administration bureaucrat Martina Panich discovers the existence of a document showing that the Nazis are systematically killing Jews by the millions. Although the Final Solution is not news to the government, a lack of incontrovertible evidence has allowed Allied inaction up to this point (to move on it would have been politically unpopular). Intelligence points to the document's being in the hands of a Pole, Isaac the Fox, whom Martina and her childhood friend, Ingo Miller, met during a youth summit in Germany in 1929-and who has his own reasons for hanging on to it. With Ingo's help, she forms a team of Jewish commandos-the Varian Fry Brigade, made up of mostly ordinary people-and has them rapidly trained for insertion into Germany, where they are to find Isaac, capture the document and bring it back. Reminiscent at moments of some of the best of the WWII thrillers, Grant's debut gets mired in multiple characters, in repeated plot and time shifts, and in digressions covering naturalism, German poetry, music and the politics of the period. The author intrudes (often addressing the reader in the second person), and even minors characters go off on declamatory tangents. Grant is trying to offer a Herman Wouk-style epic, but he never quite gets it off the ground. (Aug. 18) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This comprehensive first novel relates the experiences of four Americans who initially meet in Germany during a 1929 gathering of the Wandervogel, or German Youth Movement, whose members share a love of nature, outside adventures, free ideas, and alternative lifestyles. The group includes Ingo Miller, a sensitive young man coming to terms with his homosexuality; Marty Panich, a spontaneous and freethinking woman who later plays a prominent role in FDR's administration; handsome journalist Sammy Butler, who travels with the Red Army throughout World War II; and Isaac Tadziewski, whom Ingo saves from a group of Fascist youths and who later becomes a leader in the Jewish resistance in Poland. Marty enlists Ingo to join her later in the war to travel behind enemy lines and find Isaac, whom she believes to have documentation that would confirm the genocide of the Jews. But she's in for a surprise. A journalist based in Maine, Grant details the historical and cultural events in Germany, especially the celebration of the Wandervogel, but his characters never seem to develop adequately; the improbable chain of events makes this story confusing rather than enlightening. For historical fiction collections.-David A. Berone, Plymouth State Univ., NH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A back-to-nature youth festival in Weimar Germany and a dangerous WWII guerilla mission in Central Europe provide the backdrop for this restless, convoluted novel from Grant (Kaspian Lost, 1999, etc.). Though it opens in 1944 and then proceeds through awkward flashbacks, the story really begins in the summer of 1929, when friends and neighbors Ingo Miller and Martina (Marty) Panich are young college students in Washington, D.C. Ingo (German-American) and Marty (nominally Jewish) attend that youth festival in the idyllic German countryside. The attendees, who range from Communists to anti-Semitic rightists, celebrate the German "folk-soul" and homoerotic sentiments. Ingo will fall in love with a German lad; Marty will be deflowered by a supercilious American journalist, Samuel Butler Randolph III. In a move that's crucial for the plot, Ingo will rescue an American Jewish kid, Isaac, from right-wing bullies; the flawlessly beautiful Hagen, a devious rightist, will lead the Americans to apparent safety. Fifteen years later, the enigmatic and underdeveloped Isaac is a guerilla leader in the mountains on the Czech/Polish border; the Little Fox is legendary for his attacks on the SS. Word reaches Ingo and Marty in Washington that Isaac possesses an invaluable document, Himmler's order to eradicate the Jews; he will hand it over, but only to Ingo. An unlikely ragtag band of "desk warriors," including Ingo and Marty, leave for Europe after basic training in Maryland. Yet there's no suspense here. The mission to obtain the document is interrupted, not only by flashbacks but also by reports from Butler, a loyal Communist; he is embedded with the Red Army and under orders to obtain and destroy thatall-important directive. Another impediment to a fast-moving narrative is the author's fanciful commentary ("the lustral agonies of the Third Reich were only the fall of the House of Burgundy all over again"). The key players (Ingo, Isaac, Butler and Hagen, now an SS officer) will converge in a bloody climax weighed down by references to Macbeth and Clausewitz. A pretentious farrago.