George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers).

To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment. In the end, all the threads come together to drive home the point that allies are “stronger together.”īoth an excellent, inclusive narration of important historical events and a fast-paced, entertaining read. The horrors of war and the decisions and emotions it entails are presented with unflinching honesty through characters readers can feel for. The vigorously diverse cast is historically accurate but unusual for a World War II novel, including a young Algerian woman, a white Canadian, a Cree First Nations lance corporal from Quebec, British soldiers, a black American medic, and a Frenchwoman. Eisenhower styled “the German war machine” and “Nazi tyranny.” The narrative moves from scene to scene as the day marches on-a sea invasion, French citizens and Resistance fighters on land, and soldiers arriving by air-but repeatedly returns to Dee, a German fighting on the American side and hiding his German identity from comrades like Sid, a Jewish American determined to wipe out the Germans even as he suffers insults from his peers.

Six different operations in settings across Europe, each fictionalized with imagined characters but based on true events, exemplify the ordinary people in extraordinary situations who risked or gave their lives to destroy what Gen. The action begins just before dawn on June 6, 1944, and ends near midnight that same day.

Gratz ( Refugee, 2017, etc.) weaves together fictionalized accounts of individual experiences of D-Day, the “beginning of the end of the Second World War.”

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