Publisher's Weekly
This ``remarkably accomplished'' first novel comes at WW II from an unusual angle. Its protagonist is the wry, embittered 17-year-old Sebastian Westland, who lives in a small German town and, during the last year of the war, enlists in the SS. PW called this ``a dark triumph, with the grip of nightmare.''

Library Journal
This first novel is the story of a 17-year-old who joins the Waffen SS in the summer of 1944. It follows him through the rigors of boot camp and into the horrors of combat. His unit is one of those spearheading the desperate Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge). There is the material for a memorable novel here, but, despite some powerful and vivid battle scenes, 23-year-old Watkins doesn't quite carry it off. Too often characters and incidents seem as if they have been recycled from formula war movies, and the narrator sounds as if he has come from a novel about disgruntled and angry postwar (Vietnam) adolescents. Only for collections where war novels are popular. Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.

Michiko Kakutani
Daring and remarkably assured...provocative...Watkins proceeds in communicating not only invisible hunts of the blood, noise, and horror of the battlefield, but also the consequences the conditions of violence can have on young unformed minds. -- The New York Times