3 out of 4 stars
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The Lebensborn Experiment, Book 1 by Joyce Davis is a historical fiction novel about the end of World War II and the fallout of that war with the experimentation to make super soldiers serums and the lengths to which the Nazi regime would go to win. It was read in audible format by Kevin Gallagher, and he does an amazing job of bringing this story to life and adding depth to it. He creates excellent voices to embody the characters and makes this an enjoyable and fun story to listen to.
It imagines a dystopian universe wherein there was a successful serum created with the power to instantly resurrect anyone injected with it, but also the irony that by the time it was invented the war was over and Hitler had already taken his own life in his bunker. The story completely omits any attempt to explain the scientific nature of what is happening, and it felt quite a bit like reading a comic book related to Captain America. Each of the characters had a unique personality, but they followed along with standard tropes we would expect from a story like this and didn’t really break any new ground.
Everything before chapter seven was exposition and background about the protagonist and antagonists of the story, and each of the main characters is given some sort of history that put them into this position. The backgrounds themselves weren’t bad, but they were all cliché and felt like they were pulled from pop culture to inhabit this space: a mad scientist who looks down on those with an inferior intellect, a weak and pathetic racist Nazi Colonel raised to power in the Nazi regime who is easy for the readers to hate, and an unassuming hero who is trying to protect his family and just wants to go home.
Mixed into all of this are racist undertones of the era, and much of this is administered by the author with a heavy hand. For example, when the doctor and Oberfuhrer Strass are confronted by their black prisoners with the plan to execute them, all of their internal and external dialogue is full of racially charged terms and prejudices. This isn’t to say it was handled badly, but a little subtlety might have made such passages more meaningful overall and less like the Nazis were just caricatures of bad people.
The story itself was easy to listen to and full of well-written action, and it was easy to root for the young boy and the American soldier and root against the Nazis. However, I would have liked to see a little more nuance and less clichés: for example, the only reason the soldier is able to break free is because the doctor mixes up the super-soldier serum with the poison it is sitting right next to and injects him with the wrong one. Doctor Weiss designed them to look alike and kept them conveniently close together the same way every mad scientist seems to do in stories like this. He even has an anti-serum which will recreate the most recent death the person went through, but there is no explanation for how this could possibly work or make sense in the context of the story and it serves only as an unnecessary plot device.
I truly enjoyed listening to The Lebensborn Experiment, Book 1, and it easily earns a 3 out of 4 star ranking. The only reason it doesn’t get the fourth star is because of the aforementioned problems. If the story had been a little bit more subtle and nuanced and rested less on tired clichés it would have been considerably more powerful. It was very fun to listen to, and I think that readers who enjoy listening to action-packed historical fiction that doesn’t dwell on the science behind how things work would truly enjoy this book, either in audio or book format.
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The Lebensborn Experiment, Book !
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