What Southern Arizona authors have been up to

Written and illustrated by Anderson Atlas. (Anderson Atlas and Synesthesia Books, $12.99)

This first book in a planned series of juvenile fantasy introduces 14-year-old Allan, once a crack competitive swimmer, who’s now a mute paraplegic due to a car crash that killed his parents. He’s withdrawn and depressed, but the uncle who’s now his guardian pressures him to join him on a fishing trip. Allan seems on the verge of enjoying it when the two of them are hit by a sudden flash flood. Uncle, nephew, and Allan’s wheelchair roil through the flood, and when it passes, the chair is gone and Allan’s Uncle Rubic is unconscious. Knowing he must get help, Allan begins the torturous crawl back toward their camp. Before he can reach it, however, he comes upon a weirdly unworldly flower. Leaning in to sniff it for an aroma, Allan inhales its pollen, and suddenly finds himself transported to another world.

With poisonous plants, threatening bizarre animals (fortunately, Southern Arizonan Anderson Atlas has provided entertaining black and white drawings to illustrate their imaginative compositions), and an unfriendly society to contend with, Allan has his adventures laid out for him as tries to find his way back to Earth to save his uncle.

“Into Crosswinds”

By Monique de Jong (Monique de Jong. Hardback, $34.99; paperback, $23.99; e-book, $3.99. Available at www.xlibris.com)

Not everyone’s family story is worth rendering into a 400-plus-page novel, but you can’t say that about Monique de Jong’s. Strasbourg-born de Jong, a former professor at American University in Washington who now lives in Tucson, fictionally re-creates the experience of her Alsatian family during World War II. Some of them were Allies, some were Axis, and her father was a Jewish member of the French Resistance.

The narrative of “Into Crosswinds” concerns two branches of one family from historically disputed Alsace. Emilie Dekker’s lives in Strasbourg; her cousin Kurt Ritter’s, across the Rhine in Germany. Once Emilie’s admired older cousin, Kurt is an ardent and ambitious Nazi as the story opens in 1938. Complications soon arise: Kurt’s father hates Hitler, Emilie’s war-hating father fought for Germany in the first war. Emilie’s husband Berry is secretly Jewish, as is Kurt’s American wif,e Tracey, a reality that Tracey’s IBM-executive father alters records to hide.

When Germany invades Poland in 1939, Alsace is evacuated, and Emilie’s family finds itself in bleak barracks in the Dordogne region of Free France. SS Kurt’s assignment — which he hides from his family — is human extermination — effecting the Final Solution. It takes him to the Russian front. As the war continues, Berry joins the French Resistance and Tracey assists Jews hiding in Berlin. Tragedy is inevitable when Kurt is called home to prepare to expand the Final Solution to France.

De Jong has done a creditable job with this novel: While scene development is not always fiction-workshop polished, the overall story is compelling and suspense is well-constructed. For this reader, though, the most rewarding aspect of “Into Crosswinds” is the history: de Jong’s embedding this family narrative into a comprehensive, comprehensible retelling of the Second World War from inside France. It’s history through story, and it stays with you.

“Kid Dinosaur”

by T. C. Colburn (T. C. Colburn, $17.95)

Songwriter and outdoors enthusiast T.C. Colburn has pulled all manner of genre fiction into “Kid Dinosaur,” his first novel: fantasy, early Celtic, Native American, Western, 20th-century gangster. The book opens with a band of Norse-type warriors voyaging into a new world, but vexed by a previous loss of a magical harp and some stolen magical stones. The boy Weylyn becomes separated from the group, but he’s touched the stones and now has powers of good and evil. The rest of the book follows a Weylyn character through history—from mentoring by a sage American Indian to fleeing from fake federal agents into 20th-century Sonora — plus being trapped on the moral dark side.

The copious number of characters and nonstop action in this book make it a challenge to follow. A successful aspect of “Kid Dinosaur,” however, is what T. C. Colburn might resurrect for his next novel: the voices, senses of humor and irony, and perspectives of his 20th-century characters — blue-collar, self-deprecating, a little macho, a tad flawed.

“Office of Strategic Services 1942-45: The World War II Origins of the CIA”

By Eugene Liptak with illustrations by Richard Hook

”World War II US Navy Special Warfare Units”

By Eugene Liptak with illustrations by Johnny Shumate (Osprey Publishing, $18.95 each)

This reviewer never expected to find herself reading passages aloud when she picked up these two pamphlet-sized paperbacks with the WW II black-and-white soldier photos on the cover. Eugene Liptak surprised her, though. A Tucson librarian with an interest in military history, Liptak has written two readable, even layman-engaging books on aspects of American involvement in the Second World War.

“Office of Strategic Services 1942-45: The World War Two Origins of the CIA” (published in 2009) traces the development of the agency that was established for espionage and covert operations. “World War II US Navy Special Warfare Units” focuses on the small specialty groups developed to assist in amphibious troop landings. Here Liptak describes the Scouts and Raiders (later, SEALS), Beach Raiders, demolition specialists, and Naval Group China, which fought behind Japanese lines alongside Chinese guerillas.

In both books, he lays out the origins of the groups, along with the equipment and methodology, and operations in which they were employed. His text is well supported with photographs and illustrations. Tactical ingenuity is notable here (and worthy of reading aloud): small groups of sailors could stymie the enemy by “staging” assaults behind smoke, jamming radar, simulating rocket barrages, playing recordings of ship- and landing-craft sounds, and broadcasting the sounds of officers giving orders. Individuals showed initiative, as well: Demolition units in the field packed explosives in “GI-issue wool socks,” and waterproofed fuse lighters with condoms. Resourceful.

“Resound”

By Madelyn Raine (Madelyn Raine, $12)

Madelyn Raine was a junior at Ironwood Ridge High School when she wrote this fantasy novel — “Echeux Chronicles: Book 1.” Its target audience her peers (she dedicates it to “the losers who thought [she] wouldn’t go through with” it), its main characters are teenagers. Protagonist 16-year-old Alexandra, like other “Sounds” in the region of Echeux, is endowed with magical power. Tasked with keeping peace in their city, Alexandra and her Sounds cohorts deal with emotional entanglements along with their work assignments. When a higher level of dark magic comes on the scene, their relationships and cosmic presumptions are threatened.

Complete with a pantheon of Echeux deities and a glossary of Echeux terms, this 288-page novel represents notable extracurricular effort.

“The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp”

By James M. Deem with additional photography by Leon Nolis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $18.99)

Two strengths of this history of a World War II Belgian concentration camp are its neutral tone and statistical, factual presentation: Just as the early Nazi identification and deceptive “relocation” of Jews were slowly revealed to be mass extermination, James M. Deem’s account, which opens with one Antwerp Jew being picked up off the street and delivered by car to Fort Breendonk, it gradually reveals its horrors. Breendonk, a fort built in the early 1900s to protect Belgium from Germany, was turned into a camp for prisoners to be transferred or released, in 1940. As innocuous as that sounds, its conditions were inhumane (underlying principles being “starve them, overwork them, and beat them ....”), and only 10 percent of its prisoners would survive.

Deem chronicles the lives of many Breendonk inmates, and by the end, when he reports on the outcomes (and those of their families and children, many sent directly to the extermination camps), the magnitude of the abuse and loss of life is staggering.

Deem includes period photographs of inmates and guards and administrators, copies of identification cards and personal portraits, sketches of individuals drawn by a prisoner (portraits were assigned by an SS officer to be given away as gifts; the prisoner-artist made duplicates, which he managed to smuggle out), and scenes of the contemporary site—now a museum. “The Prisoners of Breendonk” will be a valuable contribution to Holocaust literature.

“The Prosperity Company”

By Phillip Richardson (Philip Richardson, $9.95)

“Old Tucson radio station owner” (his own words) Philip Richardson dedicates this novel about unionizing coal miners to family members and neighbors of his youth who actually worked underground. Set in 1927, “The Prosperity Company” tells the story of the family of a union miner who moves his family to a non-union mine to organize workers. The son-in-law of a regional organizer of the United Mine Workers of America, he and his four sons (the youngest of whom, narrator Thomas, having completed eighth grade, now joins them) start to work. But they also start to secretly organize. It’s a company town — housing, store, all amenities (and probably local law enforcement) — provided and controlled by the mine owners opposed to unions — so the miners risk losing all if they cross management.

It’s a slim book, with a conflict — plus a romantic subplot — that moves quickly. Richardson’s depiction of the miners’ work and conditions deep in an early-20th-century coal mine are vivid, informative and definitely worth the read.