5 Stars on Amazon!
We are starting to get some great reviews from fans and some top Amazon book reviewers for which I'm most humbled and thankful! Visit amazon.com and search 'Erndell Scott' or 'Paper Boats' to find and read the reviews.
If you've read and enjoyed 'Paper Boats,' please leave a review on Amazon.com and Goodreads.com. And please remember, a portion of the proceeds goes to Together We Rise, a charity that supports homeless and parentless children. Thank you!
"I decided to 'LOVE' this novel because it is both fresh and compelling in a way few novels are. The book is fresh in that it looks at the end phase of WWII in Berlin through the eyes of two young boys and through their experiences with the people they meet. The author's narrative gift is what makes the telling so compelling. It took me a few pages to 'recalibrate' to the world of the young Jewish slave, Otto; to his view of the world; and to the 'sort of' German syntax of some of his sentences. Once I had done that, the pace of the story had me hooked. I wanted to follow Otto on his missions as a courier for the NAZI governmental elite, now holding out in the infamous bunker in Berlin as the Russians overrun the city. Through Otto's eyes we see both bestial and sympathetic denizens of the bunker in those final days. We learn Otto's 'back story' of being first herded into a ghetto with his family and neighbors and then being passed on to a Polish extermination camp. Otto has more than 'nine lives' and more speed and nimbleness than a cat: his missions are always hair-raising and suspenseful. Finally, he is given a mission by Adolf Hitler himself to take an incendiary document detailing complicity in 'The Final Solution' from the bunker to Admiral Donitz, Hitler's choice to succeed him as head of the German state. Martin Borman, Otto's initial link with his courier job, belatedly realizes that he cannot afford to let Otto be successful. Borman attaches Joseph Kessel, a devoted member of the Hitler Youth to the mission. Then he sends an assassination kommando to liquidate one or both of them. Most of the tale deals with the boys' run through war-ravaged Germany into Poland in search of the truth about the death camps and in search of whether Otto's parents or his childhood friend Annie have survived. The Nazi-oriented Hitler Youth and Otto make an unlikely alliance, full of friction, and their unfolding story is told with a good deal of irony as well as with believable development. We come to feel that young people, whether they were in the Hitler Youth movement or were Jewish or were 'whatever' will remake the German world in the post-NAZI era. In the end, I felt that the author's researches and fictive reconstruction of this little known period in the war left me with a deeper understanding of life in Germany and Poland in that brief span of time. Erndell Scott has written a story that will 'stay with you."
- James Ellsworth, Top Amazon Reviewer
