“Sometimes we must do things we otherwise would not.” So says Josef Haupt, the father in Wells’s pained and polished debut, as he makes a choice that pierces the conscience—and, to his mind, saves his family. This incisive historical coming-of-age novel dares to examine the unthinkable: the life of a Catholic family in German-controlled East Prussia whose father, despite hating Hitler and “the silly spectacle of Nazism,” feels compelled to accept a position of power in the local Reich. For Josef, becoming the local Ortsbauernführer is a reluctant compromise to protect the farm and family he loves, to maybe get a new road to his property, and to keep himself out of a Nazi prison.

Compromises beget more compromises, of course. Wells understands that readers will anticipate the horrors to come, and Good Town stirs an anxious empathy as the war, the Reich, and the Haupts’ lives all get inevitably worse. Josef tries to shield his family from world-shaking events, and teach them what it takes to survive, his wife Dorothea finds her illusions about human decency shattered, especially as the Jews in their town endure cruel persecution and then pogroms. The Haupt children, meanwhile, ask hard questions and try to live normal lives, but the Reich keeps lowering the draft age. Throughout, the Haupts strive to navigate each new danger and preserve some semblance of normalcy, only slowly understanding that there’s always worse to come—and that even compromise won't exempt from tragedy.

The material is challenging and upsetting, as Wells examines the hardest of questions: why did good people in good towns seem to do nothing to stop the Nazis? The answers—fear, hope, incredulity, a refusal to give up on hard-won safety and security—are moving and understandable yet, in Wells’s assured telling, also intentionally never quite satisfying. As daughter Margarete matures, the world comes crashing down. Wells movingly depicts Margarete’s will to live and the lessons she’s learned, lessons that resonate with urgent power.

Takeaway: Moving, accomplished novel of a German family’s compromises in WWII.

Comparable Titles: Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A