Westfallen

The novel opens with a prologue-like address from Henry Platt, a twelve-year-old narrator writing from 2023. He warns the reader that he and five other kids are responsible for the worst thing imaginable, and these pages serve as a record in case their plan to fix it fails. He alludes to a place called Westfallen, a Nazi-controlled America. Alice, the 1944 narrator, offers a similar address at the start of her first chapter, establishing the dual-narrator structure that alternates throughout the novel.

Henry's story begins in Millerton, New Jersey, when he reunites with two estranged childhood friends, Frances Moore and Lukas Strohman, for the backyard burial of Zeus, a pet gerbil they once rescued together. The three drifted apart the summer before seventh grade. Henry is prone to panic attacks, and his younger brother, Eli, who is autistic, greets Frances and Lukas warmly. While digging the grave, Lukas's shovel strikes metal, and they unearth a dark green radio.

In a parallel 1944 narrative, Alice rescues her older brother Robbie's homemade radio from the curb. Robbie built it from scrap parts before shipping out to fight in World War II. Alice's father forbids her from bringing it inside, so she and her neighbor Artie Muller store it in her mother's old garden shed. Inside, the radio crackles to life. Alice's best friend, Lawrence Powell, a Black boy whose family lives above Alice's garage, arrives and hears voices through the speaker.

Both groups make contact. Frances identifies herself as being from "planet Mars," and Artie responds from "planet Jupiter," establishing code names the groups use throughout. They discover they all live in Millerton and arrange to meet but cannot find each other. Through careful comparison of their surroundings, they reach a startling conclusion: They are in the same shed, using the same radio, but seventy-nine years apart.

Over subsequent sessions, the groups share details about their eras. The 2023 kids describe modern technology while the 1944 kids talk about wartime life: Victory gardens (home vegetable plots grown to supplement food for troops), scrap metal drives (collections of discarded metal for manufacturing weapons), and rationing. When Alice hangs a curtain over the shed window, Henry notices one appear in the 2023 shed, proving actions in 1944 alter the future. A buried Mars bar confirms that changes take until midnight to manifest. Meanwhile, Lukas privately tells Artie about the Allied D-Day invasion, revealing that the real landing happened at Normandy, not at Calais where the Allies planted decoy tanks.

Henry and Frances discover through Google that Snyder's Sweets, a candy store the 1944 kids know, burned down on May 2, 1944, because of a faulty hot plate. They convince the 1944 kids to unplug it. The fire article vanishes from Google, but the intervention triggers devastating consequences: Henry's classmate Ada Kim has vanished. Because Snyder's survived, it became a convenience store where Ada's father, Ji-ho Kim, was shot and killed during a 1987 robbery. He never married, never opened his magic shop, and Ada was never born.

The kids scramble to undo the damage. On their second attempt, Alice, Lawrence, and Artie find the original hot plate, plug it back in, and its faulty wiring sparks the fire. By midnight, history resets and Ada is restored.

The experience convinces all six kids the radio is too dangerous. Henry discovers Lawrence's father's name on the war memorial with a death date just weeks away but resolves not to interfere. The 1944 kids smash their radio; the 2023 kids bury theirs. By midnight, the buried radio vanishes, confirming the connection is severed.

The next morning, Henry, Frances, and Lukas wake in a radically altered world called Westfallen. Officers in brown shirts take Lukas away in a van bearing a swastika and the words "Property of S.S. / Westfallen, Deutschland"; the S.S. is the Nazi paramilitary organization that controls this version of America. Henry's family is classified as mischling, the Nazi designation for people of mixed race, because his great-grandfather was Black. He is tattooed and assigned to work-learning, unpaid child labor determined by racial classification.

In 1944, the kids discover evidence of what went wrong. Artie finds that his father has checked out a war atlas of the English Channel and France's coast, raising suspicion that Mr. Muller's Nazi sympathies led him to act on the D-Day information Lukas shared. In a well beneath the shed, they find a candy wrapper bearing a swastika and the word "Westfallen" dated 2023. Lawrence discovers that the crystal powering the radio came from the well wall, and a second matching crystal lies amid the debris of the destroyed radio.

The shed retains a unique power: Inside it, the kids' real memories return, but when they stay away too long, they forget their old lives. In Westfallen, Lukas has been placed in a Jewish work program. Jewish children are sent away at thirteen, and his birthday is May 22. Henry hides Lukas from Nazi guards in the well beneath the shed.

Frances finds a page from a Westfallen textbook depicting "The Telegram that Turned the Tide," a coded message sent from Millerton's Western Union office on May 13, 1944, signed AFS, which revealed the D-Day landing locations to the Nazis. The date has not yet passed in 1944. Henry and Frances seal the page in a makeshift boat and launch it into the well, hoping the underground creek connects to 1944.

Alice and Lawrence retrieve the message. Lawrence realizes the two matching crystals could each power a new radio. The 1944 kids build two radios, bury one for the 2023 kids, and carve "MARS DIG" into the shed table. Alice paints the same message inside bedroom closets. Henry finds it, digs up the radio with help from Ada Kim, his closest friend in Westfallen, and reestablishes contact. He identifies the telegram's sender as Anna Fry Schultz, whose name adorns the Westfallen library.

Alice, Lawrence, and Artie race to the Western Union office. Artie stalls Anna Schultz at the counter while Lawrence crashes through the ceiling trying to access the wiring. Alice grabs Schultz's purse, but an officer finds nothing and locks all three kids in his car. They watch Schultz walk out, apparently victorious. Then the telegram operator, Myra Bladnik, reveals she never sent the real message. Artie had slipped a Westfallen coin with a swastika into Schultz's purse, and when the operator saw this coin from a future Nazi America, she typed only zeros. Schultz is arrested.

In Westfallen, Henry and Frances rescue Lukas from the Hudson Juvenile Detention Center, their middle school repurposed as a prison. They enlist Lukas's father in a stolen Nazi uniform and extract Lukas from solitary confinement, escaping through the building's garage.

The three 2023 kids reunite in the shed and confirm via the crackling radio that the telegram was stopped. Both groups settle in to wait for midnight. Alice begins writing her account of everything that happened. Henry writes the prologue that opens the novel.

At midnight, Henry, Frances, and Lukas step outside. The street sign reads "Primrose Street" again. They collapse in joy. But a siren sounds, a white van screeches to a stop, and Ada Kim jumps out and tells them to get in. The novel ends on this cliffhanger, leaving Ada's warning unresolved, and positions itself as the first installment of a continuing series.