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The Children's War
Peter has had more identities than he can remember and suffered pains and humiliations he longs to forget. But, whether spy or prisoner, slave or propaganda tool, none of his roles has brought the one thing he wants above freedom.
THE CHILDREN'S WAR
Bad papers. That's how Peter's nightmare began. Living in contemporary Europe under Nazi domination -- more than fifty years after the truce among the North American Union, the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union -- Peter has struggled to make sense of the reign of terror that governs his world. Now, arrested for bearing a false identity, he is pulled full-force into a battle against Nazi oppression. The crusade for freedom that belonged to generations past is now Peter's legacy -- and his future depends not on running away, but on fighting back.
Escaping a Nazi prison camp and joining the Underground Home Army, Peter dedicates himself to breaking down the system that betrayed him. But by facing the evil at the heart of the Nazi political machine, Peter falls deeper into a web of intrigue and adventure that risks everything he holds dear -- in this life and for the sake of future generations.
A disturbingly real vision of what could have been, The Children's War is a page-turning epic thriller with a mesmerizing premise and an unforgettable cast of characters. J.N. Stroyar's searingly authentic, impassioned vision of human triumph over the forces of corruption and cruelty stands as a powerful tribute to the millions who have sacrificed and died in the name of freedom.
THE CHILDREN'S WAR
Bad papers. That's how Peter's nightmare began. Living in contemporary Europe under Nazi domination -- more than fifty years after the truce among the North American Union, the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union -- Peter has struggled to make sense of the reign of terror that governs his world. Now, arrested for bearing a false identity, he is pulled full-force into a battle against Nazi oppression. The crusade for freedom that belonged to generations past is now Peter's legacy -- and his future depends not on running away, but on fighting back.
Escaping a Nazi prison camp and joining the Underground Home Army, Peter dedicates himself to breaking down the system that betrayed him. But by facing the evil at the heart of the Nazi political machine, Peter falls deeper into a web of intrigue and adventure that risks everything he holds dear -- in this life and for the sake of future generations.
A disturbingly real vision of what could have been, The Children's War is a page-turning epic thriller with a mesmerizing premise and an unforgettable cast of characters. J.N. Stroyar's searingly authentic, impassioned vision of human triumph over the forces of corruption and cruelty stands as a powerful tribute to the millions who have sacrificed and died in the name of freedom.
1168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
October 7, 2008
This is a huge book, but well worth reading if you have the stamina for it.
Takes a classic sci-fi staple, alternate history, and takes it to the very bitter end.
What if the Nazis won World War II is a very common alternate history idea used in many sci fi stories, but this one extrapolates this idea with so much detail and heartbreaking realism, that you end up thanking our lucky stars that we DID win WWII.
The book already takes place in a time where the Nazis have won WWII and pretty much conquered all of Europe. America is still technically its own country and the last free country in the world, but has no influence or power over the Nazi empire.
There are few small pockets of resistance left in Poland and we see some resistance fighters struggle against the awesome juggernaut of the Nazi empire. Our hero is a disillusioned Brit who somehow ends up in the Polish Resistance and we see through his eyes just how dismal life is under the iron heel of Nazi rule.
Takes a classic sci-fi staple, alternate history, and takes it to the very bitter end.
What if the Nazis won World War II is a very common alternate history idea used in many sci fi stories, but this one extrapolates this idea with so much detail and heartbreaking realism, that you end up thanking our lucky stars that we DID win WWII.
The book already takes place in a time where the Nazis have won WWII and pretty much conquered all of Europe. America is still technically its own country and the last free country in the world, but has no influence or power over the Nazi empire.
There are few small pockets of resistance left in Poland and we see some resistance fighters struggle against the awesome juggernaut of the Nazi empire. Our hero is a disillusioned Brit who somehow ends up in the Polish Resistance and we see through his eyes just how dismal life is under the iron heel of Nazi rule.
September 25, 2018
¨Cool Reich¨ o ¨Who Framed Agent Halifax?¨
I.
First things First. On one hand, there is almost no explicit allohistory suporting the worldbuilding and the implicit facts, sugested in the story itself, are annoyingly far fetched. And yet, there is an enormous effort to make the story and background as credible and realistic as it can he. Characters, on the other hand are utterly cartoonish. So, the first and greatest critique I have to this novel is that contrast due to ¨uneveness¨ of imagination. The background, the world, and the characters seem to belong to different universes. It is somewhere claimed that this book is the result of a ten years research. I doubt it. Ten years of writting, may be. As I read it, it felt as if the autor (or authors) wrote a chapter, corrected it (perhaps) add it to the pile, and went on. Chapter after chapter. Later on, the same author, or some other one, may have re-read some of those chapters, and correct the inconsistencies in the following ones to make everything fit so not a single paragraph had to be left out. Thus, a one thousand and hundred and fifty two novel got published. A tome of alternative history as thick as a Bible, with two pages of allohistorical background, if so, and a plot that doesn´t really go anywhere. The worst part is, that all the elements were there. This could have been a sort-of Spy novel about a betrayed agent finding out why and who. Or a family saga going from the end of the war to the refugee inmigrants, passing through resistance, concentracion camps, forced labor, betrayal, collaborationism, etc. Just to name some ideas. But no. ¨Childrens War¨ is the Maquis De Sades ¨How to survive in Nazi Europe, should the Axis win WWII, for pseudo-patritriotic pseudo-reasons, (even when you can fit in or emigrate since your comrades abandoned/used you, and/or don´t really care about it)¨ handbook.
Not only the novel lacks of allohistorical notes, or explanations, or references but the only ¨public¨ character in the whole story is no less than ¨The Fürer¨, and he is not named really, he is just described with the, allegedly, worst aspects of Hitlers, alleged, personality. There are no maps and no precise dates. That is what I call, ¨literary cowardice¨, at the service of making your ¨Bible Thick¨ novel more ¨Credible¨, more ¨plausible¨. The absence of a allohistorical tale, and the grotesquely biased version of friends and (specially) foes by themselves do not make this novel a bad one (at least not to me) but considering the stlyle and tone, the ¨texture¨, if I may say, of such a mamoth of work, wich deserves my entire respect, those are not negligible failures.
II
As I read the novel, in other words, I had the impression that the sole purpose of it was to satisfy some twisted fantasy of torturing to extintion every single NAZI anyone one can imagine, or I shall rather say, torture Nazism itself. So the narrator goes page after page, humiliating them, defiling their still living bodies, their wanning race, so they may become usefull gimps for their polish overlords, whithout them even noticing.
More than once, it is stated, by the same NAZIS that the ¨Lesser Beings¨ are as Aryans as the Aryans, and they are ¨objetively¨described by the omnicient narrator as blue eyed, blonde, sexy, born-and-raised-for-the-job, outlawed renegades. More Aryan than the Aryans, in fact. They act as one, even when they have ample political differences, and therefore, very diverse political agendas, whitin these ¨Home Army¨, in wich they serve or serves them, depending on your point of view.
Let us stop here a moment. Stroyars Home Army survived eightysome years after the end of the war, but what did it became?. Are they rebels within the Reich? Resistance? Guerrilla? Terrorist? Political Minority? ... what do they want?. Cesesion? Topple the goverment? Control from inside?. NEIN. The Home Army, in ¨Childrens War¨ is a ¨Cobra-I.S-Hydra-ZealotsInMassada-StarWars-esque¨ spearhead group of the coolest secret agents, femme fatales, Rambos, Chiens de la Guerre, infiltrators, smuglers, frankshooters, hackers, etc, that ever lived. They demand things from foreing powers, steal state secrets from highly secured facilities, plant bombs, kill any member of the governement they chose, impose conditions on any authority or institution they may encpunter, blackmail the High Command of the Third Reich and infiltrate to their Highest spheres of powers, with absolute impunity, among other things. And one wonder ¿doesn´t this means they already control the Third Reich?. NO. Remember the purpose of the novel. It does not matter how retarded, groggy, fiendish, fat, small and self destructing cowards the NAZIS are, they are still dangerous, and the omniscient narrator insist upon it, against the proof presented by ¨itself¨. But, since germans are not humans, you can kill as many as you want, in plain day, with your own bare hands, then rub some humectant cream and breastfeed your baby before you retire for a quiet nap, because if its against the Nazis, its not Genocide.
If I could grant ¨Cero¨ stars, or ¨half a star¨, to a book, I would still give ¨Childrens War¨ one full star. It, quite skillfully, portrays the unappealling, and somehow ridiculous, kinky S.M relationship between this ¨Peter/Alan¨ and: his NAZI femdom owner (and her husband, and her confused daughters and sons), a Rebel Blond Busty Mind-Dominatrix, a British Resistance comrades wife, a Gay Concentration Camp Commander, some ugly fat teens, and a selection of all their friends and relatives. The only one who seems to be missing the irresistible sexual charisma of this ¨bondesque¨ hero seems to be the anal-probing maniac cientinst with german accent.
In ¨Childrens War¨ we also find an ¨almost¨ masterpiece of surrealism, since, as the ¨plot¨ unravels, the reader comes to realize some things, situations and personae in this world are too good, too bad, too moronic, too naive, to be true, some character (mostly Ryszard) realices how odd that is, as if by doing so, the plausibility of such machinations and coincidences, of this entire (non written) alohistory and its couterfactual reality, were restored. Always remember the importance of credibility when writting and selling Alternative History. So, there are moments when Ryszard apears to very close to becoming aware that he is a character in a ¨normalweird¨ novel.
III
I really tried. I tried to read this novel as a reference to all those rebelious movements and resistence groups in the twentieth century. Some kind of atempt to understand those who opose modern oppression and end being even more oppressive than their oppressors. But it doesn´t fit either. (SPECIAL NOTE HERE: In my country, Argentina, suggesting that freedom fighting may include retaliatory abduction of your enemies babies will certainly earn you some eyebrows lifting, and, perhaps, some graffiti in your house).
I expected some twist, something like those two or three dialogues in wich Ryszard exposes his reasons to take over the Reich, lets say, by ¨inflitration¨, instead of taking it by assault, in wich some character, or the narrator ¨itself¨ reaches some deep conclusion about the lack of purpose of life, humanity, and history, and/or how war and struggle, ideology, religion and flags, provide an ilusion of such purpose. But I was greatly disapointed. Frustrated even. I tried to see the action as a product of the characters psichology, but, any achievement in that aspect, character building I mean, is more due to be a result of the length of the time the reader spents with them (the amount of words dedicated to them, that is), rather than the quality of the quill they came from.
I do respect the efort though. Stroyar (or the Stroyars behind her) went far, she was close. She tried too. And all in all, I shall read the second part of this story, just to see if next time we can both nail it.
I.
First things First. On one hand, there is almost no explicit allohistory suporting the worldbuilding and the implicit facts, sugested in the story itself, are annoyingly far fetched. And yet, there is an enormous effort to make the story and background as credible and realistic as it can he. Characters, on the other hand are utterly cartoonish. So, the first and greatest critique I have to this novel is that contrast due to ¨uneveness¨ of imagination. The background, the world, and the characters seem to belong to different universes. It is somewhere claimed that this book is the result of a ten years research. I doubt it. Ten years of writting, may be. As I read it, it felt as if the autor (or authors) wrote a chapter, corrected it (perhaps) add it to the pile, and went on. Chapter after chapter. Later on, the same author, or some other one, may have re-read some of those chapters, and correct the inconsistencies in the following ones to make everything fit so not a single paragraph had to be left out. Thus, a one thousand and hundred and fifty two novel got published. A tome of alternative history as thick as a Bible, with two pages of allohistorical background, if so, and a plot that doesn´t really go anywhere. The worst part is, that all the elements were there. This could have been a sort-of Spy novel about a betrayed agent finding out why and who. Or a family saga going from the end of the war to the refugee inmigrants, passing through resistance, concentracion camps, forced labor, betrayal, collaborationism, etc. Just to name some ideas. But no. ¨Childrens War¨ is the Maquis De Sades ¨How to survive in Nazi Europe, should the Axis win WWII, for pseudo-patritriotic pseudo-reasons, (even when you can fit in or emigrate since your comrades abandoned/used you, and/or don´t really care about it)¨ handbook.
Not only the novel lacks of allohistorical notes, or explanations, or references but the only ¨public¨ character in the whole story is no less than ¨The Fürer¨, and he is not named really, he is just described with the, allegedly, worst aspects of Hitlers, alleged, personality. There are no maps and no precise dates. That is what I call, ¨literary cowardice¨, at the service of making your ¨Bible Thick¨ novel more ¨Credible¨, more ¨plausible¨. The absence of a allohistorical tale, and the grotesquely biased version of friends and (specially) foes by themselves do not make this novel a bad one (at least not to me) but considering the stlyle and tone, the ¨texture¨, if I may say, of such a mamoth of work, wich deserves my entire respect, those are not negligible failures.
II
As I read the novel, in other words, I had the impression that the sole purpose of it was to satisfy some twisted fantasy of torturing to extintion every single NAZI anyone one can imagine, or I shall rather say, torture Nazism itself. So the narrator goes page after page, humiliating them, defiling their still living bodies, their wanning race, so they may become usefull gimps for their polish overlords, whithout them even noticing.
More than once, it is stated, by the same NAZIS that the ¨Lesser Beings¨ are as Aryans as the Aryans, and they are ¨objetively¨described by the omnicient narrator as blue eyed, blonde, sexy, born-and-raised-for-the-job, outlawed renegades. More Aryan than the Aryans, in fact. They act as one, even when they have ample political differences, and therefore, very diverse political agendas, whitin these ¨Home Army¨, in wich they serve or serves them, depending on your point of view.
Let us stop here a moment. Stroyars Home Army survived eightysome years after the end of the war, but what did it became?. Are they rebels within the Reich? Resistance? Guerrilla? Terrorist? Political Minority? ... what do they want?. Cesesion? Topple the goverment? Control from inside?. NEIN. The Home Army, in ¨Childrens War¨ is a ¨Cobra-I.S-Hydra-ZealotsInMassada-StarWars-esque¨ spearhead group of the coolest secret agents, femme fatales, Rambos, Chiens de la Guerre, infiltrators, smuglers, frankshooters, hackers, etc, that ever lived. They demand things from foreing powers, steal state secrets from highly secured facilities, plant bombs, kill any member of the governement they chose, impose conditions on any authority or institution they may encpunter, blackmail the High Command of the Third Reich and infiltrate to their Highest spheres of powers, with absolute impunity, among other things. And one wonder ¿doesn´t this means they already control the Third Reich?. NO. Remember the purpose of the novel. It does not matter how retarded, groggy, fiendish, fat, small and self destructing cowards the NAZIS are, they are still dangerous, and the omniscient narrator insist upon it, against the proof presented by ¨itself¨. But, since germans are not humans, you can kill as many as you want, in plain day, with your own bare hands, then rub some humectant cream and breastfeed your baby before you retire for a quiet nap, because if its against the Nazis, its not Genocide.
If I could grant ¨Cero¨ stars, or ¨half a star¨, to a book, I would still give ¨Childrens War¨ one full star. It, quite skillfully, portrays the unappealling, and somehow ridiculous, kinky S.M relationship between this ¨Peter/Alan¨ and: his NAZI femdom owner (and her husband, and her confused daughters and sons), a Rebel Blond Busty Mind-Dominatrix, a British Resistance comrades wife, a Gay Concentration Camp Commander, some ugly fat teens, and a selection of all their friends and relatives. The only one who seems to be missing the irresistible sexual charisma of this ¨bondesque¨ hero seems to be the anal-probing maniac cientinst with german accent.
In ¨Childrens War¨ we also find an ¨almost¨ masterpiece of surrealism, since, as the ¨plot¨ unravels, the reader comes to realize some things, situations and personae in this world are too good, too bad, too moronic, too naive, to be true, some character (mostly Ryszard) realices how odd that is, as if by doing so, the plausibility of such machinations and coincidences, of this entire (non written) alohistory and its couterfactual reality, were restored. Always remember the importance of credibility when writting and selling Alternative History. So, there are moments when Ryszard apears to very close to becoming aware that he is a character in a ¨normalweird¨ novel.
III
I really tried. I tried to read this novel as a reference to all those rebelious movements and resistence groups in the twentieth century. Some kind of atempt to understand those who opose modern oppression and end being even more oppressive than their oppressors. But it doesn´t fit either. (SPECIAL NOTE HERE: In my country, Argentina, suggesting that freedom fighting may include retaliatory abduction of your enemies babies will certainly earn you some eyebrows lifting, and, perhaps, some graffiti in your house).
I expected some twist, something like those two or three dialogues in wich Ryszard exposes his reasons to take over the Reich, lets say, by ¨inflitration¨, instead of taking it by assault, in wich some character, or the narrator ¨itself¨ reaches some deep conclusion about the lack of purpose of life, humanity, and history, and/or how war and struggle, ideology, religion and flags, provide an ilusion of such purpose. But I was greatly disapointed. Frustrated even. I tried to see the action as a product of the characters psichology, but, any achievement in that aspect, character building I mean, is more due to be a result of the length of the time the reader spents with them (the amount of words dedicated to them, that is), rather than the quality of the quill they came from.
I do respect the efort though. Stroyar (or the Stroyars behind her) went far, she was close. She tried too. And all in all, I shall read the second part of this story, just to see if next time we can both nail it.
March 21, 2012
Heavy book. Heavy in weight, heavy in subject, and just plain really hard to make sense of. Where was the editor? And why give it 4 stars if the plot lines are flailing around like the ends of a broken rope? Len Deighton also tackled the alt history of "what if the Nazi's had won?" in "SS-GB" and did it with so much better characterization, plot structure, and sense of place. Why did I like this book and the sequel "A change of regime" so much? Because of the main character, a young man run afoul of the authorities who begins in the absolute nightmare of being crated up like a vase for shipping to rise as a fighter, a husband, and as a father. His ultimate redemption runs in parallel with the changes in the regime both from within and without and give us hope for the future. A rewarding slog.
November 28, 2021
This story had an interesting concept. Hitler won the war. Germany took over all of Europe, including England. This book focused on the people working for the Polish Underground. The reason I kept reading the story, though, was because the character of Peter was so interesting. He was raised in England and went to Eton. His brother turned him in to the Gestapo, but Peter wasn’t home, so his parents were taken instead. They both were killed. Peter was on his own. He was caught as a draft dodger, so he was made a criminal and given a tattoo. He was sent to Germany for re-education and was experimented on. He lived for years as a slave to a sadistic Nazi, Karl, and his family. Peter is the reason I finished this story because I really wanted things to get better for him. He got Elspeth, Karl’s wife, pregnant and had a daughter by her. He got married to an underground assassin, Zosia, and adopted her daughter, who was killed because she was with him one day when he got caught. He and Zosia had another daughter as well. In the end, Zosia finally ended up falling in love with him, rather than just using him for the cause. Good story.
May 24, 2019
I found this tome to be a captivating story. It is is a monumental literary work, marvelously written, rich is detail. Tolstoyian. The first 390 pages is tough because the author takes the reader into the deepest depth of human depravity, but none of the activities are unfounded in mankind's history. Nothing in this section or what follows following rings false. This section is a foundation for what follows, including the themes the characters wrestle with, such as, what is collaboration, is collaboration a justification for survival, what price is paid to belong to a group, when are you a murderer instead of a couragous freedom fighter, & what makes us human or less than human. I liked how the author teases out the story of Peter, the main character, throughout the entire book. The author brings out the hearts and minds of the characters. Resting on human behavior with slavery, the Holocaust, the underground activities in WWII, this is a brilliantly structured story.
October 9, 2025
Stroyar’s The Children’s War opens not with the clash of armies or the familiar spectacle of dystopian fire, but with a whisper—a man half-remembering his past, his freedom, and his name. It is a massive book, in size and in moral ambition, daring to ask what happens if the Nazis had won the Second World War and Europe had sunk into a permanent Reich.
But this is no pulp alternate history, no adolescent thrill ride in jackboots. Stroyar imagines a Europe where the machinery of oppression has done what machinery does best—replaced memory, conscience, and resistance with bureaucracy and fatigue.
Her imagination is terrifyingly methodical; she does not sensationalize horror, she normalizes it, which is infinitely more disturbing. What makes the novel remarkable is not its “what if” premise but its “what now”—how the remnants of humanity cling to meaning after language, morality, and identity have been stripped away.
The protagonist, Peter Gustavson, is a physicist—a thinker rather than a fighter—whose life is violently dismantled when the state brands him an enemy. From this quiet intellectual space, the novel drags us into the brutal system of camps, torturers, and informants. Stroyar constructs Peter’s story with an agonizing intimacy.
The pain is not cinematic; it’s institutional, repetitive, mundane. The narrative crawls through the psychological wreckage of a man who loses everything but his consciousness, and that consciousness becomes the battlefield. In a lesser novel, Peter would emerge as a symbol or an allegory. But Stroyar denies that easy redemption. He is intelligent but helpless, educated but powerless. Through him, Stroyar poses the ancient philosophical question: when stripped of all agency, does the soul survive?
The prose itself mimics captivity—long, labyrinthine, often disorienting, yet never careless. Reading it feels like being inside the slow gears of a totalitarian machine. There are passages where you almost want to escape the text, but then realize that’s precisely the point—you are meant to feel trapped within its architecture, because so are its characters.
Stroyar’s stylistic endurance is a moral gesture. She refuses to compress pain into manageable narrative units. Instead, she lets it sprawl, insistently, until the reader begins to internalize its rhythm. This is where the novel’s literary genius hides—in its ability to translate systemic evil into form.
Beneath the horror, though, the book pulses with a philosophical inquiry into power, complicity, and the corrosion of truth. Stroyar belongs to that rare lineage of speculative writers—Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, and, in a more historical sense, Primo Levi—who understand that dystopia is not a place but a process.
The world of The Children’s War is horrifying precisely because it feels like the logical outcome of ordinary obedience. Every guard, every bureaucrat, every small-town informer has simply followed procedure. Stroyar’s realism lies in that banality. Evil is not flamboyant; it is efficient, even polite.
At its core, the novel explores the moral anatomy of survival. Peter’s journey from scientist to prisoner to reluctant resistance figure unfolds like a slow decay of certainty. There are moments when he compromises, moments when he resists, and moments when he simply endures.
Stroyar’s compassion for her characters is brutal in itself—she refuses to romanticize their endurance. She knows that trauma doesn’t make saints; it makes survivors, and survivors are messy, contradictory, often cruel. This moral complexity gives The Children’s War a density that few dystopias achieve. There are no grand heroes, only broken people trying not to vanish.
Thematically, Stroyar is obsessed with the fragility of moral knowledge. The Reich in her imagined Europe has lasted long enough to become invisible. Generations have grown up inside its logic. Words like “freedom” and “justice” have been redefined until they mean their opposites.
This linguistic corrosion feels chillingly prophetic in an age where propaganda has become ambient noise. The novel was first published in the early 2000s, but reading it now, in an era of algorithmic manipulation and performative politics, it feels less like an alternate past and more like a forecast that’s quietly come true. The terror isn’t in the gas chamber; it’s in the sentence structure of state-approved textbooks, the hollowing out of words.
There is a dark, Beckettian humor beneath the surface too—an irony born of repetition. The bureaucracy of oppression becomes absurdly self-sustaining, like a Kafka machine that’s forgotten its purpose but continues to hum anyway. Stroyar’s world doesn’t simply replicate Nazi iconography; it expands it into the everyday. The power of this choice lies in its banality—an evil so efficient it no longer needs to justify itself. By grounding horror in routine, Stroyar forces the reader to question how much of our own “normal” is built on quiet cruelties we no longer register.
The title, The Children’s War, is bitterly ironic. The “children” here are both literal and metaphorical—the new generations bred under the Reich’s ideology, and the infantilized citizens whose moral development has been arrested by propaganda. Stroyar suggests that a society ruled by fear eventually regresses into collective childhood: obedient, anxious, dependent on authority. This infantilization is one of the novel’s sharpest insights. It turns the grand machinery of fascism into a psychological condition. Everyone in this world is a child, afraid of punishment, desperate for approval, terrified of being left alone with their thoughts.
The novel also interrogates the idea of memory—both personal and collective. Peter’s fragmented recollections become acts of rebellion. To remember is to resist. Yet Stroyar complicates even this: memory is unreliable, contaminated by trauma, distorted by fear. The very act of recalling becomes suspect. This tension between remembering and surviving fuels the novel’s emotional engine. When Peter meets others in the resistance, their dialogues feel less like political debates and more like confessions. They are not strategizing to overthrow tyranny; they are trying to remember what freedom even feels like.
Stylistically, Stroyar balances naturalistic detail with philosophical abstraction. She writes violence with the restraint of someone who understands that description can both reveal and conceal. Her torture scenes are clinical, never pornographic. What lingers is not the act itself but its psychological residue—the way it reorganizes thought, language, and time. Pain, in Stroyar’s universe, becomes a grammar; once you’ve learned it, you cannot unlearn it. The prose mirrors this unlearning process. Sentences stretch, fragment, repeat, as if language itself were trying to remember how to be whole.
What elevates The Children’s War beyond the genre of alternate history is its refusal to offer catharsis. There are victories, but they taste of ash. Liberation, when it comes, feels partial and hollow. This refusal is not nihilism; it’s honesty. Stroyar understands that after certain traumas, “freedom” can never mean what it once did. The past doesn’t end when the regime falls; it becomes the architecture of the mind. In this sense, the novel converses with the works of Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—writers who knew that surviving totalitarianism is not the end of the story but the beginning of a new kind of captivity.
The novel’s scope is immense—political, philosophical, psychological—and yet its center remains deeply personal. Through Peter, we see the slow erosion of individuality under surveillance. The novel becomes an extended study of alienation, almost existential in its despair. The more Peter remembers his old life, the less he belongs in the new world. That alienation feels tragically contemporary. Replace the Reich’s omnipresent secret police with the digital algorithm, and the novel reads like an allegory for our own surveillance age. The question is no longer “what if the Nazis had won?” but “what happens when technology learns to enforce conformity more subtly than fear ever could?”
In terms of literary genealogy, Stroyar’s work shares DNA with Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, but it is colder, more intimate, and less allegorical. Her realism is so rigorous that the world feels lived-in rather than designed. Unlike Orwell’s sharply drawn archetypes, Stroyar’s characters exist in moral twilight. There are collaborators who are kind, victims who are cruel, idealists who betray, and cynics who risk everything. This refusal to assign moral clarity makes the book psychologically exhausting but intellectually exhilarating. It drags you through the swamp of human motives until you realize there are no pure waters left.
The sheer length of the novel—nearly 1200 pages—has often divided readers, but the sprawl serves a purpose. It replicates the endurance of oppression. Time dilates. Progress is imperceptible. Stroyar’s narrative discipline ensures that even the slowest chapters carry a kind of hypnotic dread. The repetition of suffering becomes its own rhythm, much like in The Gulag Archipelago or Life and Fate. You don’t read The Children’s War for plot; you inhabit it, reluctantly, as one inhabits history.
There is also a quiet theological dimension to Stroyar’s vision. God is mostly absent, or perhaps has fled, leaving behind the machinery of creation without its moral center. Yet traces of faith persist—in the way people help each other without reason, in the irrational hope that meaning might still be possible. The novel’s spirituality is post-religious, almost existential. Stroyar doesn’t preach redemption; she allows the human impulse to endure to stand in for grace. That, perhaps, is the most radical thing in the book: that the mere act of surviving with memory intact becomes sacred.
From a literary standpoint, Stroyar’s ability to blend genres—historical fiction, dystopia, philosophical novel—is stunning. She borrows the speculative rigor of science fiction, the moral gravity of Holocaust literature, and the emotional austerity of Eastern European realism, fusing them into something singular. The result is a book that resists categorization. It’s too humane to be pure dystopia, too brutal to be simple philosophy, too realistic to be fantasy. It exists in the uneasy space between nightmare and history—exactly where our collective conscience often hides.
What lingers after finishing The Children’s War is not any single image but a sensation—something like moral vertigo. You start questioning the scaffolding of your own comfort, wondering how much of your daily obedience is survival instinct, how much is complicity. Stroyar’s narrative doesn’t accuse; it implicates. You end up asking: if the world demanded my silence to preserve my safety, would I speak? The book doesn’t offer answers, only mirrors.
Rereading it today, decades after its release, it feels even more relevant. The mechanisms of control have evolved, the language of obedience has become subtler, but the psychological architecture remains the same. Stroyar’s imagined Reich is a metaphor for any system that convinces people that fear is normal and that kindness is optional. The fact that she wrote this long before social media’s age of curated conformity gives the novel a prophetic weight.
There’s a faint thread of tenderness running through the brutality—a belief, however fragile, that love can survive indoctrination. The relationships Peter forms are never idealized; they are desperate, transactional, yet deeply human.
In a world built on lies, intimacy becomes an act of resistance. Even the smallest gesture—a touch, a whispered memory, a shared joke—carries the charge of rebellion. Stroyar captures this beautifully. Love, in her world, is not a cure but a reminder: that even under total control, the human heart still remembers how to ache.
By the end, you don’t close The Children’s War with relief but with exhaustion—the good kind, the kind that leaves your moral reflexes re-tuned. You realize that Stroyar’s true subject was never war, or politics, or even history. It was consciousness under pressure. The novel tests the tensile strength of the human spirit, and like any real test, it hurts.
It’s rare for a book this ambitious to remain this invisible in public discourse. Perhaps it’s too long, too serious, too unwilling to flatter the reader. But those very qualities make it extraordinary. It’s a book that believes readers can endure discomfort, can sit with moral ambiguity, can think without guardrails. In a literary landscape addicted to easy empathy, Stroyar’s novel demands difficult compassion—the kind that requires thought.
So when you finally emerge from its pages, blinking, you realize that the “children’s war” was never just about them. It’s ours. It’s the war we wage every day between convenience and conscience, memory and forgetfulness, truth and comfort. J.N. Stroyar didn’t just write an alternate history.
She wrote a mirror held up to the future, and, unsettlingly, we can already see our reflection in it.
But this is no pulp alternate history, no adolescent thrill ride in jackboots. Stroyar imagines a Europe where the machinery of oppression has done what machinery does best—replaced memory, conscience, and resistance with bureaucracy and fatigue.
Her imagination is terrifyingly methodical; she does not sensationalize horror, she normalizes it, which is infinitely more disturbing. What makes the novel remarkable is not its “what if” premise but its “what now”—how the remnants of humanity cling to meaning after language, morality, and identity have been stripped away.
The protagonist, Peter Gustavson, is a physicist—a thinker rather than a fighter—whose life is violently dismantled when the state brands him an enemy. From this quiet intellectual space, the novel drags us into the brutal system of camps, torturers, and informants. Stroyar constructs Peter’s story with an agonizing intimacy.
The pain is not cinematic; it’s institutional, repetitive, mundane. The narrative crawls through the psychological wreckage of a man who loses everything but his consciousness, and that consciousness becomes the battlefield. In a lesser novel, Peter would emerge as a symbol or an allegory. But Stroyar denies that easy redemption. He is intelligent but helpless, educated but powerless. Through him, Stroyar poses the ancient philosophical question: when stripped of all agency, does the soul survive?
The prose itself mimics captivity—long, labyrinthine, often disorienting, yet never careless. Reading it feels like being inside the slow gears of a totalitarian machine. There are passages where you almost want to escape the text, but then realize that’s precisely the point—you are meant to feel trapped within its architecture, because so are its characters.
Stroyar’s stylistic endurance is a moral gesture. She refuses to compress pain into manageable narrative units. Instead, she lets it sprawl, insistently, until the reader begins to internalize its rhythm. This is where the novel’s literary genius hides—in its ability to translate systemic evil into form.
Beneath the horror, though, the book pulses with a philosophical inquiry into power, complicity, and the corrosion of truth. Stroyar belongs to that rare lineage of speculative writers—Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, and, in a more historical sense, Primo Levi—who understand that dystopia is not a place but a process.
The world of The Children’s War is horrifying precisely because it feels like the logical outcome of ordinary obedience. Every guard, every bureaucrat, every small-town informer has simply followed procedure. Stroyar’s realism lies in that banality. Evil is not flamboyant; it is efficient, even polite.
At its core, the novel explores the moral anatomy of survival. Peter’s journey from scientist to prisoner to reluctant resistance figure unfolds like a slow decay of certainty. There are moments when he compromises, moments when he resists, and moments when he simply endures.
Stroyar’s compassion for her characters is brutal in itself—she refuses to romanticize their endurance. She knows that trauma doesn’t make saints; it makes survivors, and survivors are messy, contradictory, often cruel. This moral complexity gives The Children’s War a density that few dystopias achieve. There are no grand heroes, only broken people trying not to vanish.
Thematically, Stroyar is obsessed with the fragility of moral knowledge. The Reich in her imagined Europe has lasted long enough to become invisible. Generations have grown up inside its logic. Words like “freedom” and “justice” have been redefined until they mean their opposites.
This linguistic corrosion feels chillingly prophetic in an age where propaganda has become ambient noise. The novel was first published in the early 2000s, but reading it now, in an era of algorithmic manipulation and performative politics, it feels less like an alternate past and more like a forecast that’s quietly come true. The terror isn’t in the gas chamber; it’s in the sentence structure of state-approved textbooks, the hollowing out of words.
There is a dark, Beckettian humor beneath the surface too—an irony born of repetition. The bureaucracy of oppression becomes absurdly self-sustaining, like a Kafka machine that’s forgotten its purpose but continues to hum anyway. Stroyar’s world doesn’t simply replicate Nazi iconography; it expands it into the everyday. The power of this choice lies in its banality—an evil so efficient it no longer needs to justify itself. By grounding horror in routine, Stroyar forces the reader to question how much of our own “normal” is built on quiet cruelties we no longer register.
The title, The Children’s War, is bitterly ironic. The “children” here are both literal and metaphorical—the new generations bred under the Reich’s ideology, and the infantilized citizens whose moral development has been arrested by propaganda. Stroyar suggests that a society ruled by fear eventually regresses into collective childhood: obedient, anxious, dependent on authority. This infantilization is one of the novel’s sharpest insights. It turns the grand machinery of fascism into a psychological condition. Everyone in this world is a child, afraid of punishment, desperate for approval, terrified of being left alone with their thoughts.
The novel also interrogates the idea of memory—both personal and collective. Peter’s fragmented recollections become acts of rebellion. To remember is to resist. Yet Stroyar complicates even this: memory is unreliable, contaminated by trauma, distorted by fear. The very act of recalling becomes suspect. This tension between remembering and surviving fuels the novel’s emotional engine. When Peter meets others in the resistance, their dialogues feel less like political debates and more like confessions. They are not strategizing to overthrow tyranny; they are trying to remember what freedom even feels like.
Stylistically, Stroyar balances naturalistic detail with philosophical abstraction. She writes violence with the restraint of someone who understands that description can both reveal and conceal. Her torture scenes are clinical, never pornographic. What lingers is not the act itself but its psychological residue—the way it reorganizes thought, language, and time. Pain, in Stroyar’s universe, becomes a grammar; once you’ve learned it, you cannot unlearn it. The prose mirrors this unlearning process. Sentences stretch, fragment, repeat, as if language itself were trying to remember how to be whole.
What elevates The Children’s War beyond the genre of alternate history is its refusal to offer catharsis. There are victories, but they taste of ash. Liberation, when it comes, feels partial and hollow. This refusal is not nihilism; it’s honesty. Stroyar understands that after certain traumas, “freedom” can never mean what it once did. The past doesn’t end when the regime falls; it becomes the architecture of the mind. In this sense, the novel converses with the works of Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—writers who knew that surviving totalitarianism is not the end of the story but the beginning of a new kind of captivity.
The novel’s scope is immense—political, philosophical, psychological—and yet its center remains deeply personal. Through Peter, we see the slow erosion of individuality under surveillance. The novel becomes an extended study of alienation, almost existential in its despair. The more Peter remembers his old life, the less he belongs in the new world. That alienation feels tragically contemporary. Replace the Reich’s omnipresent secret police with the digital algorithm, and the novel reads like an allegory for our own surveillance age. The question is no longer “what if the Nazis had won?” but “what happens when technology learns to enforce conformity more subtly than fear ever could?”
In terms of literary genealogy, Stroyar’s work shares DNA with Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, but it is colder, more intimate, and less allegorical. Her realism is so rigorous that the world feels lived-in rather than designed. Unlike Orwell’s sharply drawn archetypes, Stroyar’s characters exist in moral twilight. There are collaborators who are kind, victims who are cruel, idealists who betray, and cynics who risk everything. This refusal to assign moral clarity makes the book psychologically exhausting but intellectually exhilarating. It drags you through the swamp of human motives until you realize there are no pure waters left.
The sheer length of the novel—nearly 1200 pages—has often divided readers, but the sprawl serves a purpose. It replicates the endurance of oppression. Time dilates. Progress is imperceptible. Stroyar’s narrative discipline ensures that even the slowest chapters carry a kind of hypnotic dread. The repetition of suffering becomes its own rhythm, much like in The Gulag Archipelago or Life and Fate. You don’t read The Children’s War for plot; you inhabit it, reluctantly, as one inhabits history.
There is also a quiet theological dimension to Stroyar’s vision. God is mostly absent, or perhaps has fled, leaving behind the machinery of creation without its moral center. Yet traces of faith persist—in the way people help each other without reason, in the irrational hope that meaning might still be possible. The novel’s spirituality is post-religious, almost existential. Stroyar doesn’t preach redemption; she allows the human impulse to endure to stand in for grace. That, perhaps, is the most radical thing in the book: that the mere act of surviving with memory intact becomes sacred.
From a literary standpoint, Stroyar’s ability to blend genres—historical fiction, dystopia, philosophical novel—is stunning. She borrows the speculative rigor of science fiction, the moral gravity of Holocaust literature, and the emotional austerity of Eastern European realism, fusing them into something singular. The result is a book that resists categorization. It’s too humane to be pure dystopia, too brutal to be simple philosophy, too realistic to be fantasy. It exists in the uneasy space between nightmare and history—exactly where our collective conscience often hides.
What lingers after finishing The Children’s War is not any single image but a sensation—something like moral vertigo. You start questioning the scaffolding of your own comfort, wondering how much of your daily obedience is survival instinct, how much is complicity. Stroyar’s narrative doesn’t accuse; it implicates. You end up asking: if the world demanded my silence to preserve my safety, would I speak? The book doesn’t offer answers, only mirrors.
Rereading it today, decades after its release, it feels even more relevant. The mechanisms of control have evolved, the language of obedience has become subtler, but the psychological architecture remains the same. Stroyar’s imagined Reich is a metaphor for any system that convinces people that fear is normal and that kindness is optional. The fact that she wrote this long before social media’s age of curated conformity gives the novel a prophetic weight.
There’s a faint thread of tenderness running through the brutality—a belief, however fragile, that love can survive indoctrination. The relationships Peter forms are never idealized; they are desperate, transactional, yet deeply human.
In a world built on lies, intimacy becomes an act of resistance. Even the smallest gesture—a touch, a whispered memory, a shared joke—carries the charge of rebellion. Stroyar captures this beautifully. Love, in her world, is not a cure but a reminder: that even under total control, the human heart still remembers how to ache.
By the end, you don’t close The Children’s War with relief but with exhaustion—the good kind, the kind that leaves your moral reflexes re-tuned. You realize that Stroyar’s true subject was never war, or politics, or even history. It was consciousness under pressure. The novel tests the tensile strength of the human spirit, and like any real test, it hurts.
It’s rare for a book this ambitious to remain this invisible in public discourse. Perhaps it’s too long, too serious, too unwilling to flatter the reader. But those very qualities make it extraordinary. It’s a book that believes readers can endure discomfort, can sit with moral ambiguity, can think without guardrails. In a literary landscape addicted to easy empathy, Stroyar’s novel demands difficult compassion—the kind that requires thought.
So when you finally emerge from its pages, blinking, you realize that the “children’s war” was never just about them. It’s ours. It’s the war we wage every day between convenience and conscience, memory and forgetfulness, truth and comfort. J.N. Stroyar didn’t just write an alternate history.
She wrote a mirror held up to the future, and, unsettlingly, we can already see our reflection in it.
April 26, 2015
Theoretical Physicist Stroyar spent 10 years researching for this book. It shows and in all the best ways possible. What an incredible story. Written as an alternate history, Stroyar takes the reader into a world where Nazi Germany didn't lose but instead won. What would the world look like with Nazi Germany as its ruling regime?
The world ruled by the Nazi Regime is experienced through the voice of Peter. It's not his original name, not even the second name he's had, it's just one of many as he tries to survive the regime and fight it from the underground. Every part of the world Stroyar imagines under Nazi rule is so realistic that it isn't impossible to believe in its reality if Germany had succeeded. We meet Peter about 50 years after Europe has been governed by the regime. He's spent a few years in the British underground seeking ways to undermine the Nazis and a few years in labor camps as a result of minor infractions. We meet him in a Nazi prison about to undergo a 'reeducation' in order to allow him back into society...as a slave or forced laborer. We experience life in a regime governed country through the eyes, feelings, and observations of a slave to the Party. Peter, in an effort to retain some individuality, refuses to become a robot of the Party and jeopardizes his life often for that refusal. Digging deep he is able to tap into a hidden reserve of strength and escape the life of forced labor for the Nazi's to another kind of life, another kind of labor - that of the underground movement to destroy the regime from the inside out.
50 years ago the parents and grandparents of the underground members were fighting to keep Germany from winning World War II and now their children continue the war and battle cry for freedom but from secret and hidden places.
What a phenomenal read. Lots of political observations and commentary weaved in but nothing that offended this particular reader. America's role in the Nazi ruled Europe is so interesting and spot on for its role in the present with certain nations. The regime is portrayed as holding back its countries and citizens a good 30 or so years from technological advances, it felt like Europe was stuck in the 1950's while America had kept moving forward. This portrayal seems extremely realistic given the control Nazi wants to have on its people. The most interesting contrast and comparison, in my opinion, comes from that of the regime rule and the underground effort. If you have read the Hunger Games series it is very similar to the contrast and comparison between District 13 and the Capitol. In the end there are more similarities between the two rather than differences. I also found interesting the behavior and attitudes of the underground member toward Peter and those like him who had grown up under the thumb of the regime and been abused by it for so many years. The isolation of the underground members bred a certain contempt for those who had to do whatever it took to survive and flee from the Nazi government and yet that is what they were supposed to be fighting for, freedom for all from that kind of rule. I don't want to say too much more because I don't want to spoil this amazing story for others. Here's the last thing I will say. Yes, it's a hefty and weighty read but it is worth every single word, every minute you spend on it. There's a sequel, half the size of this novel, and I am anxious to read it.
The world ruled by the Nazi Regime is experienced through the voice of Peter. It's not his original name, not even the second name he's had, it's just one of many as he tries to survive the regime and fight it from the underground. Every part of the world Stroyar imagines under Nazi rule is so realistic that it isn't impossible to believe in its reality if Germany had succeeded. We meet Peter about 50 years after Europe has been governed by the regime. He's spent a few years in the British underground seeking ways to undermine the Nazis and a few years in labor camps as a result of minor infractions. We meet him in a Nazi prison about to undergo a 'reeducation' in order to allow him back into society...as a slave or forced laborer. We experience life in a regime governed country through the eyes, feelings, and observations of a slave to the Party. Peter, in an effort to retain some individuality, refuses to become a robot of the Party and jeopardizes his life often for that refusal. Digging deep he is able to tap into a hidden reserve of strength and escape the life of forced labor for the Nazi's to another kind of life, another kind of labor - that of the underground movement to destroy the regime from the inside out.
50 years ago the parents and grandparents of the underground members were fighting to keep Germany from winning World War II and now their children continue the war and battle cry for freedom but from secret and hidden places.
What a phenomenal read. Lots of political observations and commentary weaved in but nothing that offended this particular reader. America's role in the Nazi ruled Europe is so interesting and spot on for its role in the present with certain nations. The regime is portrayed as holding back its countries and citizens a good 30 or so years from technological advances, it felt like Europe was stuck in the 1950's while America had kept moving forward. This portrayal seems extremely realistic given the control Nazi wants to have on its people. The most interesting contrast and comparison, in my opinion, comes from that of the regime rule and the underground effort. If you have read the Hunger Games series it is very similar to the contrast and comparison between District 13 and the Capitol. In the end there are more similarities between the two rather than differences. I also found interesting the behavior and attitudes of the underground member toward Peter and those like him who had grown up under the thumb of the regime and been abused by it for so many years. The isolation of the underground members bred a certain contempt for those who had to do whatever it took to survive and flee from the Nazi government and yet that is what they were supposed to be fighting for, freedom for all from that kind of rule. I don't want to say too much more because I don't want to spoil this amazing story for others. Here's the last thing I will say. Yes, it's a hefty and weighty read but it is worth every single word, every minute you spend on it. There's a sequel, half the size of this novel, and I am anxious to read it.
March 31, 2010
Wow - this book is rotten. Seems as though it was written by 5 different lame authors. Very poorly edited, the plot moves one way and then shifts without explanation. Weakly constructed events that vaguely support later action seem to have been inserted here and there almost arbitrarily.
There isn't one character in the book you'll care about - all seem childish and wildly selfish - they spend a great deal of time thinking about the world's lack of gratitude for their continued sacrifices - tedious.
The protagonist is pointlessly argumentative, arrogant and dim witted - and the woman he loves matches. Feels like something a 16 year old boy would write. No adult understanding of marriage, men and women, parents - life in general.
Yuck.
There isn't one character in the book you'll care about - all seem childish and wildly selfish - they spend a great deal of time thinking about the world's lack of gratitude for their continued sacrifices - tedious.
The protagonist is pointlessly argumentative, arrogant and dim witted - and the woman he loves matches. Feels like something a 16 year old boy would write. No adult understanding of marriage, men and women, parents - life in general.
Yuck.
November 15, 2019
Ooooooof. As an alternate history set about 50 years after the Nazis won World War II (the main turning points seem to be Hitler deciding not to turn on Russia, and England capitulating to Germany), it is detailed and thorough. But lord, it is bleak and so very hard to stomach. All boys of the Reich and Reich-controlled territories (most of Europe) serving six years of forced labor/military duties beginning at age 16. Millions of people reduced to slavery, labeled untermenschen and fit for nothing except unpaid servitude to their Nazi betters. Good Aryan wives more or less required to bear a minimum of eight (!!!) children for the Reich, while the English and other subdued populace can barely muster the energy or the food coupons to have one. The Polish resistance literally living underground, in a catacomb of bunkers, teaching their children Polish (but also never to speak it aboveground or in mixed company). And I don't know precisely what happened to the remaining Jewish population of Europe, but it sounds like Hitler got his wish.
The book also makes very clear that this is not a fix-it scenario. The world has changed so much during the 50 years since WWII (the book is set at some point in the 1990s, years are never specified) that there is no going back to what it was before. Poland, and most other European nations, are gone. Populations have so melded with German populations that even if the resistance got their wish and had a new homeland established, it would be extremely sparsely populated, because people no longer think of themselves as nationalities, only whatever degree of volk they've been labelled. Revenge is not viable--justice isn't viable, because so much has been lost that can't be replaced, so many have died that an eye for an eye would leave the world depopulated. Even the US is only somewhat recognizable (and viewed through weary European eyes), seen as a country full of shallow fame-loving people who only care in fifteen-minute bursts, depending on how the press spins things. A member of the resistance realizes this and is deeply, deeply angry because everything he's suffered, his family has suffered, the war he's been taught to fight (and that his parents fought, this is the children's war of the title, a war that never really ended) will never be won. The book ends with a scrap of justice, and with the possibility of change on the horizon, but this world will never become our world. I can't even tell what it will become.
Warnings for a lot of humiliation and degradation--one character is essentially the slave of a Nazi family for three years, and there is nothing he does not suffer--and for the graphic and horrifying death of a child.
The book also makes very clear that this is not a fix-it scenario. The world has changed so much during the 50 years since WWII (the book is set at some point in the 1990s, years are never specified) that there is no going back to what it was before. Poland, and most other European nations, are gone. Populations have so melded with German populations that even if the resistance got their wish and had a new homeland established, it would be extremely sparsely populated, because people no longer think of themselves as nationalities, only whatever degree of volk they've been labelled. Revenge is not viable--justice isn't viable, because so much has been lost that can't be replaced, so many have died that an eye for an eye would leave the world depopulated. Even the US is only somewhat recognizable (and viewed through weary European eyes), seen as a country full of shallow fame-loving people who only care in fifteen-minute bursts, depending on how the press spins things. A member of the resistance realizes this and is deeply, deeply angry because everything he's suffered, his family has suffered, the war he's been taught to fight (and that his parents fought, this is the children's war of the title, a war that never really ended) will never be won. The book ends with a scrap of justice, and with the possibility of change on the horizon, but this world will never become our world. I can't even tell what it will become.
Warnings for a lot of humiliation and degradation--one character is essentially the slave of a Nazi family for three years, and there is nothing he does not suffer--and for the graphic and horrifying death of a child.
November 30, 2023
I have read the reviews here and I really don't have much to add... except this: I read the book when it was first published back in 2001. I thought the book was devastating, just brilliant. There probably hasn't been a year since that I haven't thought about the experience. I thought about it today, that I wanted to read it again. Happy to discover additional books in a series. I'm looking forward to reading them all. Yeah, I had the same feeling the first time I read War and Peace -- I didn't want it to end. Reader Response Criticism -- tough to argue with personal preference.
October 16, 2024
Read this years ago (maybe 2007?). I was thinking of it recently. Disturbing premise. I remember it being well-written. I remember some plot details and doubt I could reread it now that I have children. But to remember it after all these years, definitely made an impression.
February 15, 2018
Just couldn't do it...I was willing to stick with it for 500 pages, but couldn't hold my interest. The novel is in bad need of an editor!
June 4, 2018
DNF- page 472
November 24, 2018
One of the best really long books that I have read. Anyone that likes history, or just a great story, pick it up!
March 17, 2017
This is an excellent story, presented with well developed characters. I would not categorize it as sci-fi, but as good fiction. It is well worth reading. It took me only 2 weeks to read it - I amazed myself. You will enjoy reading this book and I highly recommend it.
March 31, 2008
This book was interesting because it combined a very fast moving/eventful plot with a well developed character analysis of the main protaganist..Peter. The author combines events from the history of the Nazi Regime and the powers fighting World War 2, as well as the formation of revolutionary moments, and used them to speculate on what life would be like if Germany won World War 2 through the eyes of Peter, an educated English man, a resister, a servant, and eventually a revolutionary fighter/husband and father. The book was over 1,000 pages long, but i found it easy to stay in to and would recommend it to those who like history and a good story to get lost in.
August 11, 2007
Have you ever wondered what would happen if the Nazi's won WWII? This long-winded story takes you into the history of the Nazi regime and weaves a somewhat outlandish plot around the Nazi party and an underground group attempting to undermine their attempts at "ethnically cleansing" their society and taking over Europe. I may knock the book a bit, but weighing in at over 1,000 pages you know it had to at least be well written and enjoyable for me to continue reading it. By the second section of the book you are invested in the main characters and want them to succeed in their resistance.
May 11, 2007
This is a very well written book where the basic plot line is "What if Hitler had won WWII..." There are three main characters in the book, the most prominent of which is Peter Halifax whose life is the focus of the book. The book follows his life from a 'normal' citizen of the Third Reich to him becoming a forced laborer. The other two main characters are Polish freedom fighters.
While the book is very long it is full of content and there is always something new happening that keeps the pages turning. This is not my favorite book, but it definetly ranks on my top five list.
While the book is very long it is full of content and there is always something new happening that keeps the pages turning. This is not my favorite book, but it definetly ranks on my top five list.
August 9, 2007
The book weaves a story about what Europe and the Western world would look like if the Nazis had won the war. The main character was born in London but after a lot of misforutne, torture, labor camps and servitude, he ends up working and living in the Polish undergroud. The title refers to the fact that the generation after the war (the children) don't remember the way life was before the war.
Very, very long and drawn out. The main characters are very memorable but...I think a lot could have been cut.
Very, very long and drawn out. The main characters are very memorable but...I think a lot could have been cut.
August 14, 2016
I almost stopped reading a couple of times because of the excessive sex scenes and general brutality of the book.
That said, this is good alternate history right here. It's a vivid, dark, awful world when the Nazis rule.
The protagonist's horribly strained relationship with one of the female characters reads like an ongoing train wreck. It's unpleasant but added a lot to the "realness" of the lives these characters live. I actually thought the protagonist seemed pretty solid but a lot of the other "good" characters have some serious psychological problems.
That said, this is good alternate history right here. It's a vivid, dark, awful world when the Nazis rule.
The protagonist's horribly strained relationship with one of the female characters reads like an ongoing train wreck. It's unpleasant but added a lot to the "realness" of the lives these characters live. I actually thought the protagonist seemed pretty solid but a lot of the other "good" characters have some serious psychological problems.
September 26, 2022
One of my favorite books of all time. Read it. It’s incredible. Yes, it’s long - I had to prop it up on a pillow when my hands got tired from holding it - because I read it for 8 hours straight until 6 in the morning. It stayed in my head for years. I read the sequel - also amazing. Then I read it again. And read the sequel again. Blown away by both each time. Just finished the third and last and starting all over to tie it back together.
July 26, 2016
I found this book in a used book store and felt the ratings on here were good enough to give it 50 pages. I was hooked within the first 10. I don't usually read alternative history, but this turned out to be quite the story. The protagonist is very relatable and the horrors he suffers are easily personified in an abstract universe. Looking forward to reading part two; although, I cannot imagine the storyline being as compelling.
August 10, 2008
Never read War and Peace, but I'm thinking it's comparable in length. A "what if" story, w/ the 3rd Reich having won WW II. At the end, I know more details about the life of Peter Halifax than my closest friends and family...but worth the read!
January 24, 2011
The novel paints a realistic and grim picture of a Europe dominated by the Nazis (who have won the Second World War) but there is also a less realistic, more fanciful tale of the Resistance that Didn't quite work for me.
December 26, 2007
An very interesting perspective to what could have been if Hilter was to succeed.
Want to read
December 20, 2008alternate history based on long lasting third Reich
February 21, 2009
Much, much too long.
March 29, 2011
Another of my all-time favorites.
August 16, 2011
This was an excruciating book to read. Although good it was depressing to be in this story under Germany's rule and experience the times.
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