A blistering, audacious, darkly luminous tale of defiant faith, ferocious innocence, and celestial rebellion.
In Charns’s latest novella, a razor-sharp, unbreakable 12-year-old dares to marshal angels against the iron cruelty of the Third Reich. In 1942 Nazi-occupied Suwałki, 12-year-old Basia Gwiazdowska serves as lookout while her father listens to an illegal radio and works with the Polish Home Army. After he smuggles twenty Jewish neighbors to safety in Lithuania, the Gestapo arrest him for treason. Left behind with her fury and fear, Basia turns to the Black Madonna, Baby Jesus, twenty Jewish angels, and a mysterious wanderer named Tortuga, assembling a celestial resistance against the machinery of Nazi power.
Charns fuses wartime realism with mystical imagination. Basia’s world is historically precise, filled with illegal radios, prison sentences, deported classmates, opportunistic collaborators, yet it is filtered through a consciousness that refuses to accept that evil is the final authority. Angels stand on rooftops in gratitude for mercy shown. Saints negotiate from the margins. Mary and Baby Jesus engage in intimate theological exchanges that oscillate between reverence and irreverence. Free will remains at the story’s center. The angels cannot overrule it, even when Basia thirsts for vengeance. Heaven refuses to participate in violence.
What distinguishes the book is its tonal daring. Horror coexists with dark humor; fascist myth collapses under ridicule. Basia emerges neither saint nor symbol but a volatile, questioning child wrestling God in real time. Fate and chance, faith and rage, are examined with audacious moral energy, suggesting that mercy—once enacted—generates forces that outlive terror. Perfect for readers who love fierce historical fiction, mystical wartime defiance, and short, powerful reads charged with faith and rebellion.
Bull City Law Publishing
Pub date February 25, 2026
ASIN B0GQ1ZCML4
Print length 37 Pages
Price $6.00 (USD) Paperback, $0.00 Kindle edition
