Purple Heart Review
I picked this up from my shelves to read recently mainly because I'd been reading a LOT of more light-hearted novels and so felt I needed something more serious to kind of balance it all out. I've also read a tiny bit of McCormick before ("Cut" and her story in "Up All Night") and was excited to read this new book of hers. This is a great book and is written so well. It's told in third person but mainly focuses on Matt and his story is so compelling. There's a bit of a mystery to it as Matt is trying to put the pieces back together of just what exactly happened to give him the head injury. The first half of the book details his recovery and the second half deals with him getting back out into the war. I don't think I've read a story about a soldier in a war, especially one still going on, and it hits you emotionally, reading about what these soldiers go through. This book opened my eyes and gave me a new-found appreciation for soldiers going into war. The relationships between everyone are clearly defined and the interactions are written realistically. This is definitely a book that needs to be read by everyone, no matter what age.
Purple Heart Overview
When Private Matt Duffy wakes up in an army hospital in Iraq, he's honored with a Purple Heart. But he doesn't feel like a hero.
There's a memory that haunts him: an image of a young Iraqi boy as a bullet hits his chest. Matt can't shake the feeling that he was somehow involved in his death. But because of a head injury he sustained just moments after the boy was shot, Matt can't quite put all the pieces together.
Eventually Matt is sent back into combat with his squad—Justin, Wolf, and Charlene—the soldiers who have become his family during his time in Iraq. He just wants to go back to being the soldier he once was. But he sees potential threats everywhere and lives in fear of not being able to pull the trigger when the time comes. In combat there is no black-and-white, and Matt soon discovers that the notion of who is guilty is very complicated indeed.
National Book Award Finalist Patricia McCormick has written a visceral and compelling portrait of life in a war zone, where loyalty is valued above all, and death is terrifyingly commonplace.
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Customer Reviews
War and an Under-Diagnosed Brain Injury - Garry Prowe - Gainesville Florida
I'm disappointed with this young adult novel; the plot is simply too predictable. This book, however, is valuable in another way. It clearly illustrates how warriors with a brain injury are often sent back to the field of battle prematurely. Like a good soldier, our protagonist Matt is anxious to return to his outfit. He under-reports the severity of some of his symptoms. Patricia McCormick makes it clear that Matt is still suffering from considerable impairment when he is judged fit for duty. His fellow soldiers quickly recognize that Matt is not quite "right." In this condition, Matt is a liability to himself and his comrades. It's good to know that the Department of Defense is studying the possibility of bio-markers that will indicate the presence and severity of a brain injury, thereby preventing warriors like Matt from prematurely reentering the battle.
A Great Book But a Depressing Ending - Homer - Florida
I loved this book totally. It had a very interesting plot and you really got to know the characters and what they were feeling as they are risking their lives in Iraq, how their unit became their family. I would have given this book 5 stars but I gave it 4 because it made me cry in the end. Even with that sad ending, overall it was a great book. Well done Patricia McCormick! =D
Predictable plot and disappointing book overall - Mitchell Wander - Washington, DC
Patricia McCormick went through great lengths to develop a realistic, fictional storyline about modern-day combat in Iraq. She focused on a small group of individual soldiers, emphasizing the perspective of Matt, a soldier wounded during a combat operation that he cannot fully remember. The book recounts several days of his recovery in a military hospital, including his efforts to understand what happened during the incident when he sustained the wounds.
Even for a book that appears to be targeted towards teen readers, the plot is simplistic and predictable. While the details and interactions are generally accurate and make the book very readable, that attention to detail is what held the book together, not the storyline itself.
In the "Acknowledgements," McCormick recognizes a fact checker who I believe did a commendable job. The only oversight I found was on pages 172-173 when Matt referred to his Squad Leader as both "Sarge" and "Sir." Contrary to the uneventful dialog in the book, a professional Army noncommissioned officer (NCO) supervising Matt would not have allowed either reference to slide without an on-the-spot correction.
For what comes off as a mostly balanced work of fiction, two sentences on page 123 are stunningly out of place. "Brody had called Ali an enemy sympathizer. But that's what they [Army officers] always said when a civilian got killed." It is very unlikely that a junior enlisted soldier would have that perspective given the highly publicized (to the troops in Iraq and the global media) investigations into civilian deaths in Iraq. These two lines did more damage to the political balance or neutrality of the book than any other references.
McCormick deserves great credit for interviewing the families of five soldiers who died in Iraq. She also met with Vets Journey Home, the staff of a veterans hospital and the American Friends Service Committee to learn about returning Iraqi vets, traumatic stress and brain injury and Iraqi civilian causalities, respectively. As a veteran, I would question her choice to conduct research with Veterans Against the War without also talking to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars, or The American Legion. I think that the book's credibility as non-political and the depth of the content would have been greatly enhanced by these perspectives.
While the book is very readable, if you plan on reading only one work of fiction about combat in Iraq, I would not recommend this one.
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Oct 24, 2010 20:15:08
