Into the Fire

by Ann Brashares, Ben Brashares

Overview

From #1 New York Times bestselling Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants author Ann Brashares and her brother Ben Brashares comes the second book in the action-packed middle grade alternate history thriller trilogy that asks what present-day America would be like if Germany had won World War II.

Former best friends Henry, Frances, and Lukas thought they’d managed to restore history to its original path after their antics with a time-bending radio went awry. But they’re still trapped in Westfallen, the version of present-day America where the Axis won WWII, living an alternate—and much darker—version of their lives.

Henry has to work at the Home for Incurables, Lukas is on hard labor all day, and only Frances, whose parents are members of the Nazi elite, gets to go to school and move freely. And since they and their friends in 1944 destroyed the radio, they have to find cruder and ever-more-desperate ways to communicate across time. Frances uses her privilege in Westfallen to gather as much information as she can, while Henry tries to turn Lukas into a local baseball hero to save him from being sent away to a work camp.

But the deeper the three friends and their 1944 counterparts dig into how Westfallen came to be, the more they begin to attract unwanted attention from people with a vested interest in making sure this version of history becomes permanent…at any cost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665950862
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Series:	Westfallen , #2
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Ann Brashares is a writer and mother of four living in New York City. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series as well as several other novels. Before becoming a novelist, she was a student of philosophy, a receptionist, an editor, a ghostwriter, and briefly, the copresident of a small media company. Before that, she grew up in Washington, DC, with her three brothers and a stunning number of weird pets. She helped her youngest brother, Ben, with his socks and shoes every morning before school until he learned to tie his own shoes himself, around ninth grade.

Ben Brashares lives with his wife and three kids in Montclair, New Jersey. He is the author of two children’s books, Being Edie Is Hard Today and The Great Whipplethorp Bug Collection. He holds an MFA in creative writing and has worked at and written for several magazines, including Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. He spent much of his youth wading through heaps of clothes in his big sister’s room looking for the family’s escape-artist tarantula, Fredricka. He may or may not have put Frederika on his sister’s head while she slept.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One If at first you don’t succeed, cry cry again.
May 15, 1944

Dear Dad,

I hope training keeps going well. I know you must be more impatient than ever to ship out. The sooner you can get to France and help free the world from the Nazis, the sooner you can come back home.

I think about that more and more, because something important and strange happened here at home. We took Robbie’s old radio and set it up in the back shed. We were as surprised as anyone when we pulled a signal from some kids we didn’t know. We didn’t just receive a signal, but also transmitted one. I know we’re not supposed to do that. We didn’t intend to. It started strange and it just got stranger. The kids we talked to are not from around here. Well, that’s wrong, they are from exactly around here but not from now. They are from the future—almost eighty years in the future. I know it will be hard to believe that and I can’t think of any good way to explain how it’s true, so I’ll just keep writing. The kids told us some things about the war. We didn’t imagine it could make any difference, but it has. We think Artie’s dad is still sympathetic to Germany, and he may have overheard. He told someone who set a chain of events in motion that will change the way the war came out. Now we have to undo the harm we’ve done. That’s all there is to it. We have to undo it before you get to France, because I don’t want to think about what could happen if we don’t.

I put down my pencil. I crumpled up the first letter, ripped it into pieces, and threw it in the garbage.

May 15, 1944

Dear Dad,

We really miss you, but we’re doing just fine here. I hope you got the cookies Mama sent. I’m busy with school and the garden and the scrap metal drive and looking out for Mama and Janie.

Your loving son,

Lawrence

I took the second letter out of my notebook. I folded it into an envelope. I sealed it, addressed it to my dad at Fort Kilmer, and stuck on a three-cent railroad stamp. It was a short and stupid letter. There was so much I wanted to say that I couldn’t say, so much to write that I couldn’t send. But I had to send something.
Monday morning our driver Jurgen drove me to school, and it was agony.

Okay. I know how that sounds.

Jurgen was the picture of the proper Nazi, with his swastika armband and tall boots, but he wasn’t the problem. He only wanted to talk about his son Zeke, whose asthma flares up when he gets a cold. The little guy’s school picture was taped to the dashboard.

The problem was being here. We thought we’d be home by now.

And why weren’t we? The Jupiter kids stopped the telegram. No D-Day info made its way to the Nazis in Berlin. The Allies should have won the war like they were supposed to. Why were we still in Westfallen?

I glanced out the window at a woman on a ladder tying the end of a banner strung across Main Street.

Millerton Pride Festival it said in huge purple letters, and underneath: Featuring three full days of nonstop Aryan family fun! Square dance! 10K race! Music recital and annual performance of The Westfallen Angel! Watch the Millerton Mustangs take on the Mapleton Miners! Share in the PRIDE! May 19–21, 2023.

I wanted to cry and throw up and die all at the same time. This was what passed for pride here.

The shame of being in Westfallen and still being Francy was almost more than I could take. The school uniform with the Nazi crest on the shirt and the pleated skirt scraped like sandpaper on my skin. And then there was the cap, like a little driver’s cap, my mom had stuck in my hand as I walked out the door. I stared at it in my lap. Laugh now, cry later. That was my motto. It was also a Drake song I used to love.

Which reminded me. I needed to make some more reminders.

I unzipped my backpack and took out my pile of sticky notes. I hadn’t seen Henry or Lukas since Ada’s midnight rescue and I didn’t know when I could get back to the shed to restore my memory of home. The shed was the only thing that didn’t change when America became Westfallen. It was our Fortress of Solitude, the place that remembered us when we started to forget. We had no idea how it worked, but the stream that ran beneath it—the one that carried a toy boat back to 1944—probably had something to do with it. All we knew for sure was that the shed held us together, reminded us that this awful place was not the only place, and we needed it like a scuba diver needed oxygen.

So I’d started keeping sticky notes around in case I couldn’t get back to the shed. I wrote dumb little things on them, the less detectable the better, like Kia (our old car) and SZA (my first concert). Each one a little zap to keep Fancy FrancePants on her heels. SZA! Zrrrp!

I rooted around in the bottom of the bag for a pen. Where do you keep the pens, Francy? I was counting on a fat pencil case with a fluffy tassel or two. I dug into the corners, emptied the bag of all the notebooks. That’s when I noticed a hidden seam along the back.

Ooh, a secret compartment. Love notes? Candy stash? It took me a minute to find the tricky little zipper and open the compartment. There was something in there. I pulled it out. A book with a purple herringbone pattern and silk ribbon bookmark. Good Lord. It was a journal. I opened the cover.

This private journal belongs to: Francy Moore

Now that’s something you don’t come across often: a journal written by an evil version of yourself whose life and body you’ve just recently come to inhabit. I froze at the thought of what could be in there. I imagined heart doodles and blubbery confessions of crushes on cute Nazi boys who didn’t love this poor Nazi girl back. Or maybe it was worse. It could be worse.

But useful. My mind started to spin as I turned the first page. My eyes blurred at the handwriting that was mine but also not mine. It was neater, darker, and the loops of the letters that went under the line were bigger. I tried to focus on the words. I wanted to read them and yet I really didn’t.

I didn’t want to face the person I was here. I didn’t want to be her or dress like her or act like her. But I also knew the better I played Fancy Francy, the better I could concentrate on finding our way home. With a cheat code to this person and this place, I could avoid the Frances! What has gotten into you? and Francy? Are you okay? Whatever advantages I had here I needed to use. Because somehow the D-Day intel got sent to the Nazis in 1944. We had to figure out how and stop it. Or get the Jupiter kids to stop it for us.

In one hand I held Francy’s purple journal. In the other I held the pile of sticky notes I made to remind me who I really was. Were the yellow paper squares strong enough to withstand a barrage of Francy’s inner secrets? Were SZA and a Drake song strong enough to hold off the evil forces of Westfallen Frances Moore and her diary of evil deeds?

Jurgen stopped at a light on Main Street. I looked out the window and suddenly, right in front of the spot where Magic on Main should have been, I saw Henry and Ada. They were walking together. To the work-school-punishment thing they went to every day. Because they weren’t purebred Nazis like me. Lucky me.

I started to lower the window to call out to them, but then I stopped. I considered. The fancy car. The driver. The uniform. The cap. I was ashamed and I didn’t have the stomach to make a decent joke yet.

I slouched down in my seat so they wouldn’t see me.

They were mischlings, mixed-race, at the bottom of the social heap here, and I was at the top. But they were walking and talking, kicking a pine cone down the sidewalk, whereas I was alone with a jaunty cap and a Nazi crest on my shirt. And Jurgen. And a picture of a cute kid with asthma and a missing front tooth.

Did Francy have any real friends? Any real conversations or deep thoughts? Probably not.

I watched Ada punch Henry in the shoulder like I used to do. It was lonely being a fake Nazi princess.

Jurgen pulled into the school’s driveway. I stuck the journal back into my bag. Laugh now, cry later. I couldn’t even laugh yet.

Editorial Reviews

2025-08-02
The efforts of six New Jersey kids to prevent the Nazis from winning World War II continue in this sequel toWestfallen (2024).

In 1944, Alice, Lawrence, and Artie struggle to correct their catastrophic error that, as Alice repeatedly has it, “DESTROYED THE FUTURE.” In 2023, Frances and Henry desperately research the changed history that finds the U.S. transformed into the Nazi-controlled tributary state of Westfallen. Jewish Lukas is largely confined, unable to help them or reach the magic shed that houses the radio that allows the kids to communicate across time, putting him at risk of losing his memories. Meanwhile, in 1944, Lawrence collects scrap metal alongside a kid who grows up to be a patient in the Home for Incurables, where Henry works in 2023. Could that kid hold the key to restoring the timeline? In this volume, Lawrence and Frances join Alice and Henry as first-person narrators, depriving Lukas and Artie of narrative agency. This lack is particularly distressing in Lukas’ case, as his isolation is affecting his personality. It falls to Henry and Alice to prod him into action—which is unfortunate for a novel that never names the Holocaust and omits persecution of the Jews from Alice’s father’s explanation of Nazi ideology (although antisemitism is an obvious feature of life in this alternate timeline). The crackling pace can’t obscure these lapses. Alice, Artie, and Frances are white, Lawrence is Black, and biracial Henry is Black and white.

Fast-moving but let down by questionable omissions.(Science fiction/thriller. 10-13)

Kirkus Reviews