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Science Fiction. Historical Fiction. Young Adult Fiction. HTML:Her story begins on a train. The year is 1956, and the Axis powers of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan rule. To commemorate their Great Victory, they host the Axis Tour: an annual motorcycle race across their conjoined continents. The prize? An audience with the highly reclusive Adolf Hitler at the Victor's ball in Tokyo. Yael, a former death camp prisoner, has witnessed too much suffering, and the five wolves tattooed on her arm are a constant reminder of the loved ones she lost. The resistance has given Yael one goal: Win the race and kill Hitler. A survivor of painful human experimentation, Yael has the power to skinshift and must complete her mission by impersonating last year's only female racer, Adele Wolfe. This deception becomes more difficult when Felix, Adele's twin brother, and Luka, her former love interest, enter the race and watch Yael's every move. But as Yael grows closer to the other competitors, can she be as ruthless as she needs to be to avoid discovery and stay true to her mission? From the author of The Walled City comes a fast-paced and innovative novel that will leave you breathless..… (more)
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The Resistance has planned an elaborate mission that requires her to first win the Axis Tour - a deadly race over the conjoined continents of what had been Europe, Russia, and Asia. It is only as the winner of the contest that she'll have the opportunity to come close enough to Hitler to make her move.
I loved Wolf by Wolf. Yael enters the Axis Tour with a dossier on each of her competitors and quickly finds that there is much that her files fail to cover. She must decipher their shared histories without revealing her identity or her mission and play to win. Yael is strong, deadly, and with a strict code and as she goes through one of the most difficult challenges in her world, we can't help but root for her.
The race element did drag for a bit--but I'm not a fan of adventure stories so that's a personal thing.
The concept is fabulous and the thought behind everything is apparent.
I'm not sure about the one element to this story but reading the
Full Review to Come
Actual Rating: 4.5/5
Wow what a ride! The story alternates between 1955 Germania and a WWII concentration camp and these changes run smoothly throughout the story. Yael our main character is taken with her family to a concentration camp. The camp doctor picks her from the crowd for experiments he is doing. He is working on a project to change the genome of the Jewish prisoners. Many have died from the transitions but Yael is able to survive and eventually shape shift. She can look at another women or photograph of a woman and change to that person. Her curse becomes her way to survival and escape from the camp.
We come to our present time of 1955-56 Germania and Hitler has won the war and there is still a resistance group trying to win the country back and stop the insanity of Hitler's purge. Yael has joined the group and the plan is for her to infiltrate the yearly Axis Tour Motorcycle Race. This would get her close to Hitler at the Victors Ball where she can assassinate him and set off the major move by the resistance.
You feel every threat and find yourself holding your breath as she makes her way through the race. Then the kick at the end holy moly Batman!
Not only is the story amazing but it stays with you and makes you think and remind us of how crazy the world was and can easily teeter back if we don't continue to be vigilant and stay on top of and stop hate and labels.
It’s a post WW-II world except the Nazis won. Even more mind-bogglingly this is not the weirdest change to our world – Yael is a skin-shifter. After a Nazi concentration camp biological experiment as a child, she has the ability to shift her appearance at will. As an adult, she
Identity is key to this novel – how do you hold on to your beliefs and values if you are forced to pretend to be someone else? Also alliances, trust, friendships and family ties.
This novel might encourage would-be fighters and spies to concentrate on their language skills – being able to speak several languages gets Yael out of several tight spots. A lead female character to appeal to the girls, motorbikes, tattoos, knives, spies and not too much mushy stuff to appeal to the boys. Teachers beware, there is swearing, although mostly in German…
Our main character is Yael, a Jew who lives in a concentration camp. She’s the camp’s doctor’s experiments. He injects her regularly to see if he can create an Aryan out of a Jew.
Hitler rarely goes out and, when he does, is surrounded by guards. There is only one way. Yael needs to win a famous motorcycle race. Hitler danced with the girl who won the previous year; if Yael can win, she can get close enough to kill the “monster,” as she calls him. This race won’t be easy. It’s a race across the continent--what has been conquered by the Germans and Japanese--to show people their power and the skill of their people; also, anything goes. Participants do whatever to get ahead, so the strongest survives. In this race, Yael meets Luka and Felix, both of whom care about Adele, the girl Yael is pretending to be. It’s a tense race with questions of whether anyone can be trusted.
This is a fascinating look at an alternate world. We often wonder how the world would be different if victors were losers and losers were victors. This is one author’s view. There is a bit of a science fiction element, but the author explains his choice at the end of the novel. The second novel will be released in November of 2016. It’s a good reading experience. I enjoyed the book
My reactions
This is interesting speculative fiction dealing with “what might have been” had Germany & Japan won WW2. It was that aspect of the book which initially caught my attention. But Graudin takes this a step further by introducing an unusual twist: As a result of experiments she was subjected to in the death camp, Yael can now “skin shift,” altering her appearance at will, which provides an incredibly valuable disguise in virtually any situation. In this case, she is impersonating Adele Wolfe, last year’s winner of the race.
The plot moves as quickly as the racers bound from Germania to Tokyo. Yael is a strong heroine – resourceful, intelligent, physically and mentally fit for the challenge. There’s a complication to Yael’s plan, when two boys close to Adele make it all the more difficult for Yael to pull off the masquerade.
I thought there were several holes in this plot, and I didn’t much care about the interpersonal drama between Adele/Yael and the two boys. I also think I would have enjoyed this kind of speculative plot without the “skin shifting” aspect. The ending is abrupt and leaves more questions than answers – could Graudin be planning a sequel?
While I recognize the appeal for the target audience, it really wasn’t the book for me, and I’m in no hurry to read anything else by this author.
I’m not quite sure how taking out Hitler would cause the entire Reich to crumble. It just doesn’t seem like his second in command would step up. Despite this criticism, Yael was a very interesting character. The book itself was fast-paced, intriguing and hard to put down. Overall, well worth picking up.
That astounding ability does not just allow her to escape a horrible death at the camp but also turns her into a key piece of the political resistance. By 1955, the number of death threats and assassination attempts against the Führer have increased dramatically so that he hardly ever makes an appearance anymore. With one exception: the winner’s ball of the Axis Tour, a motorcycle race half-way across the world. There’s not better opportunity to kill the man responsible for so much pain and hardship than there and no better person to do it than shapeshifter Yael, taking over the identity of former victor Adele Wolfe. Let the race begin!
I have to say I was more than intrigued by Grayson’s idea of what if. What if World War Two had not ended in 1945 because the Nazis won? What then? However, this book is more about Yael’s personal story and the Axis Tour than life in the Third Reich. I was incredibly interested in the parts of the story that played on the past because you could see a glimpse of that “what if” Graudin has promised. But as someone who is not very interested in motorcycles, the fact that the majority of the book was focused on the race was kind of a letdown. It made the book drag on and I had a hard time picking it up (which is why I’m still not sure if I want to read the sequel). That being said, I enjoyed the characters, especially the triangle between Yael, Lukas, and Felix.
One last comment: as a native German I did not like the randomly thrown in German words. They weren’t always grammatically correct and thus sounded odd. To have everything written in English would have made for a better reading experience!
What if the Axis had won World War II? Yael was a little girl and had been one of the medical subjects in one of the concentration camps. What they did was inject her with something to make her appear more Aryan. Turns out she could do more than appear Aryan after a while – she could
This one took a bit for me to get “into” it, but once it got going, I thought it was good. We go back and forth in time from current day Yael in the resistance to young Yael in the concentration camp and everything leading up to how she got to her current mission. There was a good twist at the end and it is a series (or maybe trilogy?), so I will continue.
An exhilarating, heartbreaking alternate history in which the Axis rang victorious and Hitler's brutal dreams of an Aryan, empowered Third Reich are realized.
Yael is an enigma; damaged and haunted by the brutal
75% of the book is a gritty, cross-country motorcycle race, which was unexpectedly riveting. Graudin's alternate WWII is haunting and well-researched, her metaphoric writing subtly effective. I've always been drawn to WWII literature, both fiction and nonfiction, but Wolf by Wolf is unlike anything I've ever read, particularly in YA. With a breathtakingly unique premise and complex, compelling characters, this was a provocative, gripping read.
I personally found the very concept of a world