Rise Of The Spider by Michael P Spradlin

This first book in The Web Of The Spider series for middle grade readers could not come at a more relevant time!

Young Rolf von Heusen is eleven years old in the spring of 1929. His main interests are football and palling around with his friends Ansel and Joshua. He thinks that his hometown of Heroldsberg, Germany is the most wonderful place in the world.

His older brother Romer does not share the same perspective. At fifteen, the once athletic and studious teenager has lost interest in both school and football. Instead, he starts hanging out with some brown shirted newcomers to town, Hans and Nils, who are opening up a youth branch of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party. They try to sell it to Rolf and Ansel as a character- and skill-building group, like Boy Scouts, but the younger boys are immediately suspicious of the lack of adult guidance and supervision. Besides which Ansel’s dad, a newspaper reporter, often talks about politics at the dinner table and loathes the Nazis with a passion.

The von Heusen dinner table hasn’t been the most tranquil place in the world lately either, with Rolf’s toy manufacturer father and Romer getting into constant fights about the state of both the economy and the country. When their father learns that Romer has joined the Nazi Youth, he goes ballistic. But it’s another discovery that Rolf makes about his brother that could tear their family apart for good.

This slender novel was both action-packed and thought-provoking, and is a great indicator of the quality of the rest of the forthcoming series. Michael P Spradlin provides historical context for how Adolf Hitler was able to rise to power following the end of World War I, in which a defeated Germany was forced to pay reparations that seriously stunted the economy, leading to widespread joblessness, poverty and unhappiness. Romer represents the disaffected generation who hadn’t witnessed the horrors of the battlefield firsthand, while his father wants to do anything possible to avoid a repeat of the bloodshed he’d both undergone himself and that had taken the life of his eldest son, Karl. Alexander von Heusen may be a struggling businessman, but he understands that Hitler’s inflammatory rhetoric promises rewards only at the cost of more violence.

Rolf is still young enough to be naive about politics and religion, but as the Nazi Youth group slowly gains power in Heroldsberg, he begins to see not only their awful direct effect on his neighbors — whom he’d never even realized were considered “other” because of their Jewish identity — but also the chilling, almost casual cruelty they encourage in people he’d always assumed to be decent human beings. As he struggles to keep both his family and community together, he starts to understand that darkness is far more prevalent in the human heart than he’d ever imagined, and that he himself must take a stand if he wants to stop it from spreading.

Given our current political climate in the United States of America, this is a great time to be handing out this book to middle schoolers and other readers, just as a reminder of how insidious xenophobia and the kind of seemingly small aggressions that lead to hideous atrocities can be. Hatred can look innocuous or even enticing, as it builds in-groups and communities that disconnected people often need, but the obligation to stamp out the political manifestation of hatred — in this case fascism — at the slightest flicker remains as urgent now as it did during Hitler’s rise to power.

I’m handing this to my 13 year-old to read next, and I think he’ll really appreciate it. He’s a good kid and we’ve definitely talked about politics before, so I think Rise Of The Spider will reinforce a lot of what we’ve discussed. It’s definitely a great book for anyone who wants to know more about why people of good common sense are so antifascist, and for anyone who needs to be disabused of the notion that “it can’t happen here.”

Rise Of The Spider by Michael P Spradlin will be published tomorrow September 24 2024 by Margaret K McElderry Books and is available from all good booksellers, including