Westfallen is mglit that perfectly baits the hook and rewards readers

Westfallen is the mglit book that you didn’t know that you needed. In this case the ‘you’ that we’re referencing are upper-elementary, middle school or just those good-time readers who want to engage in a solidly paced, semi-plausible action novel that feels like something that makes you think ‘they don’t make em like that anymore’. Westfallen also flies in the face of recent mglit books that brazenly start their book series by putting a number on its spine. I’m all for optimistic thinking, but stating the goal that more books in the series will follow this one, before establishing their awesomeness is a practice that’s fallen far short lately.

Start with the end in mind is a mantra that teachers are trying to embed in kids from an early age in education. That is very important because otherwise, it’s just an aimless journey that’s taking the audience along more akin to a hostage than an entertaining car ride that they want to participate in. It’s obvious that Westfallen has a grand scheme in mind, and part of that is woven and rode upon in this first book.

It was obvious that the book has that factor from simply catching a whiff of its plot. Kids are digging a hole to bury their class gerbil when they find an old radio that communicates with a group of kids 80 years in the past. The kids in the past are living in what will be the final days of WWII, their brothers and fathers are fighting in the war and everyone is on edge. The device allows kids to communicate through time starts with simple questions about candy and landmarks, but just might parlay itself to bigger situations with a worldwide impact.

Westfallen’s cover alludes to that with its Nazi-esque font, the blazing fire that dominates the cover and an American flag that’s in the middle of a group of soldiers but is lacking certain key elements. You know that something is wrong in this future and that the three youth who are running away from the aforementioned images have something to do with it. It’s an adventure that readers eight and up will easily get hooked on due to the commonality that the kids in the past and the ones in the present have in common.

Every reader will relate to one of the kids or know someone who is like one of them. This is the personality matrix that makes the characters from The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, Percy Jackson or other stories so identifiable. As the story in Westfallen starts to twist, the characters in the past, or is it the present, change because of the choices they’ve made in a different time. Nobody meant to do any harm, they were just burying candy and having their counterparts find it decades earlier. The candy has graduated into secret battle plans being leaked, spies living in their idyllic city, work camps where the schools used to be, and children disappearing.

I did get a little confused following the two groups and identifying which youth was in which period. There are three friends in each period and when the characters did get momentarily displaced their vocabulary, technology or mannerisms helped distinguish what was happing in their respective world. This is important because time travel and multiple worlds can get confusing. Westfallen manages to keep these potentially confusing threads together in a taut, action-filled book that pays off on the situations, but leaves enough strands out there to logically extend the story.

Westfallen has the turn-the-page characteristic that encourages, frustrates and rewards readers because they want to read the book quickly. It’s the good sense of frustration where they can’t turn the page quickly enough. It’s a real page-turner is a phrase that young readers don’t use a lot because they might not understand its meaning. Why can’t I stop reading? I want to pick up my cell phone, but the pages in my book won’t stop being thumbed forward by my hands. Books that make you think like that or do those things are rare, especially for school-age students. This is an example of a book that successfully builds a world that we think that we know, but twists it to where one of them is utterly alien. It then sets up everything to where it climaxes in a situation not too different from Back to the Future or Thelma & Louise. Yeah, those are different endings, but the fun that you’ll have in reading the first installment of Westfallen is what great books deliver and will leave young readers waiting impatiently for the next installment.  

Westfallen is by Ann Brashares and Ben Brashares and is available on Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing.

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