In this week’s issue of the Mercury, Justin Sanders reviews Ryan Boudinot’s book, The Littlest Hitler, which has become one of the more coveted titles in the Mercury office this month. Sez Justin:

Boudinot’s gifts lie not in spinning beautiful sentences, but in placing beautifully ordinary details in the thick of extraordinary situations. When he isn’t immersed in the business world, he heads for that other mecca of mundanity, suburbia. In the collection’s title story, a young boy’s father helps him assemble a pitch-perfect Hitler costume for Halloween. The only snag in this excellent plan occurs when the boy gets to school… and finds that one of the girls came as Anne Frank. In “Civilization,” a young man is selected by the government to murder his parents as part of his patriotic duty.

Most of the tales in Littlest Hitler are entertaining but weightless, all premise and literary-hip juxtaposition over substance. Only when Boudinot applies his wry pen to the real world do things get resonant. The stunning “So Little Time” follows three boys as they play D&D and work a summer job to save their money for the annual science-fiction fair. A semisweet riff on the hilarious wonders of adolescent geek-speak, the tale manages to culminate in a shocking but plausible wakeup call from the naive dream of childhood innocence, in the process exposing an emotional side of Boudinot that belies his typical reliance on plot-driven gimmickry.

Boudinot reads at Powell’s on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne, at 7:30 pm, and it’s free.