THE ASSASSINATION OF BABY HITLER

A college professor finds himself transported to 19th-century Germany and grapples with the choice of assassinating baby Hitler before the future dictator terrorizes the world.

In this first book of Turck’s The Accidental Time Traveler trilogy, 31-year-old college professor Darby Armstrong is pondering the idea of time travel while shuffling through pictures of the Holocaust when a tornado hits his house. After being swept up in the tornado, Wizard of Oz–style, he awakens on the streets of Bavaria, Germany, in the year 1891. Disoriented, Darby stumbles into a pub run by Greta Schumacher, who immediately takes the confused American under her wing. As Darby comes to terms with the idea that he could personally prevent the Holocaust from happening if he finds and kills Hitler (who’s currently just a baby), he’s guided along his adventures by the Augur—a ghostly figure who presses upon Darby “the ultimate need for precise and predictable order in the Universe. There are consequences to upending the order of a Universe already written.” Darby and Greta (whom Darby has drafted into his mission) find an unexpected ally in Komisar Ernst Toler, a German soldier whose military career falters after he loses his hand. Turck manages to alternate, sometimes in a disconcerting manner, between silly comedy (“Hey, little time-Nazi, no pun intended. Why are you being such a dweeb to my man here? He’s just trying to find a way home and get his groove on with the fraulein”) and moving philosophical ideas (“Time travel, in Darby’s humbly informed view, was more parable than principle. The seduction of travelling in time was that it was essentially a fantasy wrapped around the desires or guilt of the would-be time traveler”). Unfortunately, the prevalence of sentence fragments and typos distracts from the overarching themes of grief, love, and nature vs. nurture. Turck explores some interesting questions in a text that would benefit from a tighter edit.

An uneven but thoughtful and amusing tale that considers the ethical consequences of time travel.