War Stories (Gordon Korman)
Most middle grade novels focus on a pre-teen child, but War Stories by Gordon Korman (2020, Scholastic ) is not most middle grade novels. The protagonist is an old man looking back at his seventeenth year, the year he enlisted in the US Army to serve during WWII. The book isn't gruesomely detailed, but neither is it a sugarcoated account. Jacob Firestone in the present plays himself up to his great grandson Trevor as a John Wayne figure, gutsy and dauntless. Where, in Hiroshima , Laurence Yep relays blunt historical facts that shock by their uniqueness, Korman befuddles readers with a viscerally harrowing portrayal of on-the-ground combat. Here, the victims are more often soldiers than bystanders. Jacob is particularly saddening, as he's underage. I recall Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and its iconic alternate title, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death . A child, Jacob is idealistic and emotionally vulnerable, having lied to enroll out of a sense...