Beautifully Written, Painful to Read

Title: The Yellow Birds
Author: Kevin Powers

From the publisher's book description:
'"The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city... Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.'

Insights and Telling Details

+ Joanne summed up the power of this novel precisely: "We've all read war stories, but none like this." The reality of modern combat is disturbing, horrifying, and not what we think. There is no down time. Just constant slaughter without purpose, taking and retaking the same city over and over again.
+ Powers' narrative style is deeply moving and his way with metaphor is powerful and strange. The military jargon is a little daunting to the civilian, but looking up the terms used solves the problem.
+ A few of our readers confessed to not fully understanding the plot. Why is he arrested? For writing the letter? Ultimately we decided the reason was contained in the text: somebody had to be held to account for the death of the soldier.
+ The story moves back and forth in time. While some felt that a chronology would help the reader, others appreciated this method for the way in which it supports the story., The narrator, as he tries to make sense of it all, is never truly in one place without being in the other. It's a sophisticated narrative style, where time is disjointed and disclosure is partial.
+ Steve was celebrating the new life of his grandchild while reading this at night. The experience, he said, was "hard, hard, hard."
+ The narrator struggles to understand, but he never judges. "Eventually, I had to learn that freedom is not the same thing as absence of accountability."
+ Two of our number say this book affected them more than anything else they're read about war. With some of the best writing we've ever experienced, The Yellow Birds is a surprising, tender, brutal book. We recommend it, with reservations because of its grim power. The reader is a participant in this war. This is no distant history. We are still living it.