Front Lines - Blog Posts

Image credit: Harper Collins Publishers, Matt Murphy, Joel Tippie

Marita here. I’m apparently incapable of writing brief reviews, so buckle in.

World War II seems to be having a moment in YA, between Code Name Verity and Salt to the Sea and Wolf by Wolf (Hi, Melissa!), and it seems like I have been sucked in, too.

I picked up this book because I thought the cover was amazing, and something about the author’s name tugged on my memory.

So then I opened it up and read the first line of the prologue: “I’m not going to tell you my name, not right away.”

And WHA-BAM! It hit me. Michael Grant, the author, is married to K.A. Applegate, the author of Animorphs. For those not in the know, every Animorphs book begins something like, “My name is ____. I can’t tell you my real name. It’s too dangerous.” It’s a bit of an open secret that although his name’s not on the books, he collaborated with her on the series that pretty much defined my childhood. Some people know Harry Potter forwards and backwards, and some people know Lord of the Rings and some people know Star Wars, but I am a scholar of Animorphs.

So, yes, this made me very happy. 

The real strength of Animorphs is that it used fantastic settings and characters and circumstances to explore very real and important issues. It’s about a war between two alien species that humans got caught in the middle of, but the fact that it is a war is never forgotten. There are casualties and sacrifices, and it hurts.

Over the course of the series, each character is slowly broken in their own unique way. It is, at heart, the story of six children (OK, four children, a hawk, and an alien) who are thrown into a war they simply aren’t prepared for. Their only choices are to become soldiers or die.

It is a science fiction series through and through, but the brutality and the horror and the cost of war feels very, very real.

After reading Front Lines, I have to believe that that gritty, realistic tone was in large part Michael Grant’s contribution.

Front Lines, the first book in the new Soldier Girl series, is not science fiction or fantasy. It is a meticulously researched historical epic. There is exactly one fact that is not historically accurate, one court case detailed in the opening pages:

FLASH: “In a surprise ruling with major ramifications, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Becker v. Minneapolis Draft Board for Josiah Becker, who had sued claiming the recently passed Selective Service and Training Act unfairly singles out males. The decision extends the draft to all US citizens age 18 or older regardless of gender.”

--United Press International--Washington, D.C., January 13, 1940

Women became draft-eligible just in time for World War II. This is the single cog that Grant fits in to the machinery of history, and the whole thing spins out naturally from there. And my God, is it incredible.

Told in a roving third-person point of view, this is the story of three teenage girls heading to war. Rio Richlin is a sweet, innocent California farm girl who is thrown off balance by the death of her older sister in the Pacific theater. Almost on a whim, she lies about her age and enlists with her friend Jenou. Frangie Marr is small and unassuming, but dreams of being a doctor. However, because she happens to be black and female in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1940′s, this is little more than a pipe dream. She enlists because her family desperately needs the money, and because being an army medic might pave her way to the MD she’s hungry for. And Jewish New Yorker Rainy Schulterman just wants to give Hitler a taste of his own medicine. She’s icy and intelligent, and even though the men around her are quick to write her off, she’s determined to put her skill with languages and numbers to good use.

Our heroines make it through boot camp just in time to join the fray in North Africa and become embroiled in the Battle of Kasserine Pass.

Why is this book important? For a couple of reasons.

The one at the top of my list is that it makes war immediate and real. I’m a girl. I’ve never had to think seriously about going to war, and I don’t have any immediate family in the armed forces, either. War is a distant concept to me. I can have sympathy for the experiences of soldiers, but empathy simply isn’t possible because there’s nothing I’ve experienced that can compare. Sure, I can appreciate Saving Private Ryan, but once again, I can’t really empathize. I’m watching men I don’t strongly identify with going through things I can’t comprehend.

This book of teenage girls on the front lines made the battlefields of World War II feel personal. These are girls I could have been in another life, reacting like I would have reacted. They’re as confused and determined and angry as I could see myself being in the same situation. I may not know what it’s like to fire an M1 Garand and take a life, but I do know what it’s like to walk into a room full of boys and have them size you up and dismiss you in the same glance. And I do know what it’s like to want to show the boys you’re competing with that they’ve dismissed you at their own peril. I can definitely put myself in the shoes of these soldier girls.

(Side note: I’m almost resentful that this book was written by a grown man, but captures the feeling of being a teenage girl so incredibly well. He writes with such sensitivity about things like schoolgirl crushes and nail polish and hairstyles without being belittling or dismissive. It’s just not fair.)

There’s so many perfect scenes, so perfectly experienced by our heroines. This book is filled with countless moments that bring the war to life. Not a word is wasted. Every little instance of disenchantment and demoralization and rage and fear hits hard. You’re there on the transport ship on your way to the front for the first time, realizing that you’re still just a civilian in an army uniform. You’re there in the foxhole, aiming an M1 at another human being and hoping you miss. You’re there in the medic tent, making the impossible triage decisions. That experience alone makes this read so worthwhile.

Also important is the fact that Grant doesn’t pull any punches--not when it comes to the reality of war, and not when it comes to the prevailing attitudes at the time. This book is not for the faint of heart. There are scenes of extreme gruesomeness, and there is explicit and offensive language. It’s a hard book to read, but it has so many important things to say that you’re not doing yourself a favor by avoiding that pain.

A lot of war movies focus on the glory of battle and the unbreakable brotherhood between soldiers, how noble and brave they all are. But that’s whitewashing history. The soldiers who defeated Hitler were a bunch of scared kids. They were also, by and large, sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic. Many WWII works avoid acknowledging that the US army was still segregated at that point (probably because it would detract from our hero worship of those soldiers), but this fact is never sidestepped or excused or swept under the rug in Front Lines. In one scene, a soldier comments on the irony of sending a segregated army to fight a white supremacist and is immediately booed by the rest of his barracks, and that’s probably one of the least upsetting things that happens in the book. The fact that our three heroines are the continual targets of this bigotry drives that point home perfectly, if painfully. They don’t have to be as good as the white male soldiers they’re constantly measured against, they have to be better to earn any grudging respect.

World War II was that rare war that truly needed to be fought. Unfortunately, we’re a generation that has pretty much forgotten the lessons learned there. We’ve forgotten that Hitler was democratically elected. We’ve forgotten that the disenfranchisement of the Jews happened by inches and feet, not all at once. We’ve forgotten that the Holocaust happened because too many people saw evil happening but refused to speak up out of apathy and convenience. We’ve forgotten what it’s like for our country to go all-in on a war with rations and drafts. We’ve forgotten how it feels to live under a constant umbrella of fear. We’ve forgotten that lofty ideals don’t win wars, ruthlessness and violence do. And we’ve forgotten that the soldiers of that war weren’t glorious heroes. They were fallible, imperfect humans like the rest of us. He (or she) who forgets history is doomed to repeat it, though. By revising history, Grant manages to undo a lot of historical revisionism.

This is, all in all, an incredible tale that sucks you in, gets under your skin, breaks your heart, and shows you a whole new side to the story you thought you knew.