Wit­ness the chill­ing rise of Hitler’s Ger­many through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy in this first book in the action-packed mid­dle grade series Web of the Spi­der for fans of I Sur­vived and A Night Divid­ed. 1929, Herolds­berg, Ger­many. Rolf might only be twelve years old, but he’s old enough to know that things have not been good in his coun­try since the end of the Great War. Half of Ger­many is out of work, and a new polit­i­cal move­ment is tak­ing hold that scares him. Every night, Rolf’s father and old­er broth­er, Romer, have increas­ing­ly heat­ed argu­ments about pol­i­tics at the din­ner table. And when two mem­bers of the new Nazi Par­ty, Hans, and Nils, move to town as part of the Hitler Youth, Rolf is uneasy to see how enam­ored Romer is by their promis­es of bring­ing Ger­many to glo­ry. Rolf doesn’t trust Hans and Nils for a moment. For all their talk of great­ness, they act more like bul­lies, antag­o­niz­ing shop own­ers who are Rolf’s friends and neigh­bors. Yet Romer becomes increas­ing­ly obsessed with their mes­sage of divi­sion, and Rolf watch­es in hor­ror as his fam­i­ly frac­tures even fur­ther. When there is an act of van­dal­ism against a Jew­ish-owned busi­ness in town, Rolf fears Romer might have had some­thing to do with it. Can Rolf find a way to inter­vene before things get any worse?