Bad Love Strikes by Kevin L. Schewe, MD; Jan-Carol Publishing; 2019; 198 pages.
SAN DIEGO — A happy go-lucky crowd of teenagers, who give each other goofy nicknames and dream up adventures, live in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the former home of the Manhattan Project, which was America’s top-secret effort during World War II to develop an atom bomb before the German Nazis did.
In this novel for young adults, two members of the “Bad Love Gang” slide down a ravine, find a tunnel, and discover the headquarters of another project that was even more hush-hush than the Manhattan Project. It was an ultra-secret effort to build a time machine that might change history in the event an atomic bomb couldn’t do the job.
The boys—most of them absolute geniuses in various fields—soon figure out the machine’s purpose and decide to go back in time and rescue some Jews and Gypsies before they are murdered at the Chelmo concentration camp, which the Nazis had erected in Poland.
They devise a complicated plot to carry out their fantasy, and along the way, hurl mock insults at each other, listen to the music of the 1960s and 1970s, and, in the case of one time-traveler, fall in love.
This book is fun. It invokes the memories of such personages as Albert Einstein and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and speculates about how future generations of humanity will be able to hurtle in just an instant through space and time continuums.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com