The Useful Ones

 

Two families. A century apart. The same fatal mistake.

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Ingrid Schmidt’s Berlin in 1936 is a city reborn. Her father’s bakery is thriving on new state contracts, the streets are orderly, and the future feels solid as the family’s signature Vollkornbrot. The Schmidt family are not fanatics. They are pragmatists. They believe their hard work and compliance will protect them. They are useful.

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Adriana Garcia’s Ohio in 2024 hums with prosperity. Her father’s construction company has just won a major federal contract to build state-of-the-art “processing facilities.” They are living the American dream, built on loyalty and the rule of law. The Garcia family are not radicals. They are patriots. They believe their service and status will shield them. They are useful.

 

But systems of persecution do not run on ideology alone. They run on transactions.

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The Useful Ones is a searing, masterfully crafted parallel narrative that follows the Schmidt and Garcia families as they navigate the rising tides of nationalism in their respective eras. With chilling precision, Lisa M. Lee traces the identical, incremental steps from prosperity to pariah, from citizen to captive.

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As neighbors are targeted, each family finds logical, legalistic reasons to look away, convinced their own usefulness is a permanent currency. They are the businessmen who take the contracts, the builders who pour the concrete, the ordinary people who enjoy the new sense of order. They are the enablers. And history holds a brutal lesson for enablers: the machine they help build does not know to spare its mechanics.

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A devastating work of speculative fiction rooted in documented history, The Useful Ones is more than a story. It is a diagnosis. It is a provocation. It demolishes the seductive lie of personal exemption and forces a terrifying, urgent question:

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When the walls go up, which side will you be on?