It's only to their credit that this Barrington Stoke book starts with a quote from Heinrich Boll (can't do umlauts). A lot they do credits them, of course – thick, coloured stock on the paper formats of their books, large clear-as-clear print, and everything that makes reading disabilities and dyslexia as little of import as possible, so all can have something to read. Which is most pertinent here – just because it's large print doesn't make it right for, say, an eight-year-old, although that age is what the publishers think is the lower limit for reading this. I however felt it might be quite harrowing for one so young, for in the first chapter we see the young MP's mother killed. And she's not alone.

We're looking at Bruno, a lad in eastern Germany at the close of WW2, with the Soviet forces advancing. Just starting to flee their home for somewhere quieter, she gets killed, he gets pulled away by someone else, who also gets killed, leaving him alone – were it not for the bizarre mother-substitute of a deserting Soviet forces dog, that Bruno soon titles Frida. And while he might have gained a dog the script just cannot let us or him forget his mother is no more. Which is the first warning sign that this will be as heavy-handed as anything else I can remember reading.

I disliked this with a venom, unfortunately. And yet I know it will fill a hole in educators' collections, and be deemed very worthy, and achieve all it sets out to do. I just didn't appreciate how it did it. It will be entertaining (as well as galling, pessimistic and emotive) for the target audience, but I just found this brow-beating. Without going into the ins and outs, Bruno gets a lesson into how evil Nazi Germany was, and how Germans must – as this admits she has done – try to correct everything since. All because, you know, Syria.

I write this within days of some teacher woman here in the UK asking people to stop calling her woke pupils "woke". Well, stop making them woke, then. This demands survivor guilt, which we extrapolate to modern refugee crises, and the next thing all our kids are slamming their heads against door-frames because, you know, slavery. Forget any transferable lesson here, however, for what I read just seemed patronising, detailing every nastiness of the Second World War in turn, being very heavy-handed on all the Axis and Soviet sides, and never letting any shade into the heart of what to all intents and purposes is a history lesson. And a haranguing one, too.

The unlikely journey of this book's character, and the modern day coda, do as I say provide a pleasant narrative, but that's only really the case when you forget the mother's death (impossible), ignore the lad's suicide thoughts (implausible), and skip over the 'you-only-brought-this-on-yourself-now-have-some-2021-refugees' moral of the piece. As I say, this will be manna for some educators and librarians, but this is just a piece of propaganda to trigger no end of demands on susceptible minds. It certainly isn't a story about an orphan boy and his foundling dog – would that it were.