Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

Max Willi Fischer’s Working the Angles is set in 1937 Akron, Ohio, where eighteen-year-old Deet Jenkins leaves high school for a job at Consolidated, one of the city’s enormous rubber factories. He enters factory life as a battle over union representation spreads through Akron’s rubber industry, placing workers under pressure to decide who speaks for them. At the same time, political movements are competing for followers across northern Ohio. Deet sees that divide inside his own family through his cousin Hugo Geller, a Cleveland teenager devoted to the German American Bund, an organization supporting Adolf Hitler’s Germany. As labor disputes move beyond factory gates and political groups push their beliefs into everyday life, Deet finds himself surrounded by people certain they understand what America needs, leaving him to decide where he stands.

Max Willi Fischer’s Working the Angles follows the Jenkins family as political alliances reshape their community through competing ideas about America’s future. The author does a beautiful job with period details, breathing life into Depression-era Ohio. Deet is wonderfully drawn, with an inquisitive nature that makes his reactions feel organic. His decency comes through in small moments, making him an appealing young protagonist. Arch Jenkins, Deet’s father, is fascinating. The author develops him into a fully fleshed-out man, and the respect he has built among fellow workers is palpable. During a sit-down strike, Arch appeals to security men he once trained by evoking their shared history. Fischer shines in making the settings characters in their own right, from descriptions of Plant One, where enormous milling machines stretch beneath a roof spanning several football fields, to the East Ninth Street pier, where a freighter’s ruddy hull blends into a pinkish-purple sunset over Lake Erie. Intelligently written and atmospheric, readers who enjoy historical fiction will adore this.