Chasing the American Dream has the kind of premise that could have easily collapsed into a familiar Nazi-hunting thriller, but Lorelei Brush steers it somewhere far more uncomfortable. The novel isn’t really interested in revenge fantasy or tidy justice. It’s interesting in what happens after history supposedly ends, when the war is over, the headlines move on, and ordinary people are left carrying memories that refuse to settle into the past. Brush takes the polished nostalgia of 1950s America and scratches at it until the whole thing starts to look cracked, nervous, and morally exhausted.
What gives the novel its bite is how personal it feels. Brush spent months researching her own father’s connection to the Office of Strategic Services at the National Archives, and you can feel that obsession underneath the pages. There’s anger in this book, but also disappointment. Not just disappointment in governments or institutions, but in the stories people tell themselves about heroism. That emotional undercurrent keeps the novel from becoming a cold historical exercise.
David Svehla is not introduced as some fearless crusader. He’s a Cleveland family man trying to perform normalcy while clearly failing at it internally. The war never really released him. When he unexpectedly spots Dr. Gerhardt Adler, a former SS officer he personally escorted to Nuremberg years earlier, casually walking down an American street, the moment lands like a punch to the chest. Brush handles the scene without melodrama. No giant cinematic reveal. Just the sickening realization that history did not end the way David believed it did.
From there, the novel tightens gradually rather than exploding outward. David begins to follow Adler almost compulsively, slipping back into the instincts of his OSS years, and what starts as a private mission turns darker once the U.S. government’s role becomes impossible to ignore. Brush digs directly into the moral filth surrounding Operation Paperclip and America’s willingness to absorb Nazi scientists for political advantage during the Cold War. The novel never screams its outrage, which honestly makes it more effective. The hypocrisy simply sits there in plain sight.
What stayed with me most wasn’t the conspiracy itself but the effect David’s obsession has on the people around him. His pursuit of justice slowly mutates into something selfish, even destructive. Brush understands that the desire to feel heroic can become its own kind of addiction. There’s a sadness running through the domestic scenes, conversations with his wife, moments with family, where you can feel a man drifting away from the life he claims to be protecting. That emotional erosion gives the story its weight.
The 1950s setting also feels disturbingly current. Brush folds in McCarthy-era paranoia, sensationalist media, anti-communist hysteria, and institutional secrecy without making the novel sound like a lecture. The parallels emerge naturally. Everybody is terrified of appearing disloyal. Everybody is performing certainty while hiding compromise underneath it.
Stylistically, the writing moves fast but never feels thin. Brush doesn’t drown scenes in decorative prose. She keeps things lean, sharp, and emotionally direct. The result is a historical novel that feels less like revisiting the past and more like uncovering something people worked very hard to bury.
By the end, Chasing the American Dream stops asking whether justice is possible and starts asking what happens to people who build their entire identity around chasing it. That shift gives the novel its real sting.
Chasing the American Dream: A Novel by Lorelei Brush offers a compelling look at hope, resilience, and the pursuit of a better future. The novel is available for readers to purchase.
Note: This Book Review first appeared in The New York Weekly.
Book Review
from Bedside Reading
by Jessica Morgan
The Boy with the Butterfly Mind by Lorelei Brush is the story of a mother navigating the complexities of raising her neurodivergent son. Julie Crawford is a dedicated wife, mother, and high school math teacher. When her four-year-old son, Patrick, displays signs of ADHD with his behavior at home and at day care, Julie seeks a proper medical diagnosis. However, her husband, Luke, is hesitant to put a label on Patrick's neurodivergence. Their clash of opinions soon threatens to drive a wedge between them. Meanwhile, Julie struggles to teach her students, and her relationship with the principal is strained. As Patrick's ADHD worsens, Luke turns to alcohol, and it adds more tension in the household. Can Julie find a way to treat her child and mend her marriage?
I’ve written more than 10 drafts of my in-process novel, now called Butterfly Minds. It’s been through my writer’s group multiple times, the advisory committee for my Doctor of Ministry degree, two developmental editors, and 5 beta readers. I cannot tell you how much I would like the current draft to be my last!
Readers often ask me where I get the idea for a book. As I suggested in my first posts, I write novels to resolve the conundrums I encounter in life. For Chasing the American Dream, the issue came from living with my angry father, whose constant irritation seemed to come from being frustrated that his American Dream had not come true. Edwin Brush, Sr., pictured at the right in 1942, died in 1972. If I wanted to figure out why he had been so angry and often lashed out at me, I was on my own.