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brennarn's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
tessa_grayreading's review against another edition
4.0
"What I was realizing was that war isn't what breaks soldiers. It isn't being a trained killer, and killing, nor is it the constant brushes with death and the loss of fellow soldiers. What actually breaks the soldier isn't the fighting and the dying. It's the peace."
I got this book by accident. Apparently something went wrong with my order and when I got this book I was slightly confused but just started reading it and got about halfway through before I realized that there really had been a mix up and this was not the book I had ordered (it had been a few weeks since the order okay).
But I was already hooked, so I continued reading.
I'm glad I did.
The writing, after a slightly rocky start, got better with every sentence. In any other book the inconsistencies and abrupt scene changes would probably have annoyed me but this is a story about a drug addict who's usually either drunk or drugged or both, so the writing was really fitting.
I have never been in a warzone or in any situation where my life or anyone elses was truly on the line so I have no way of knowing what being a soldier- and a veteran- is like and I do not want to imply that I have even the slightest idea of what that must be like, but I could understand the character's motives and reactions quite well, thanks to the straight-forward writing, to the first person narration and the flashbacks in the middle of stressful situations which made it so easy to understand why he was reacting the way he was.
The ending came a little abruptly, but as Anthony writes in the Epilogue: "Real life endings are never what you expect, because those magical moments that catch us off guard can never be predicted."
And when has real life ever not caught us off guard?
I got this book by accident. Apparently something went wrong with my order and when I got this book I was slightly confused but just started reading it and got about halfway through before I realized that there really had been a mix up and this was not the book I had ordered (it had been a few weeks since the order okay).
But I was already hooked, so I continued reading.
I'm glad I did.
The writing, after a slightly rocky start, got better with every sentence. In any other book the inconsistencies and abrupt scene changes would probably have annoyed me but this is a story about a drug addict who's usually either drunk or drugged or both, so the writing was really fitting.
I have never been in a warzone or in any situation where my life or anyone elses was truly on the line so I have no way of knowing what being a soldier- and a veteran- is like and I do not want to imply that I have even the slightest idea of what that must be like, but I could understand the character's motives and reactions quite well, thanks to the straight-forward writing, to the first person narration and the flashbacks in the middle of stressful situations which made it so easy to understand why he was reacting the way he was.
The ending came a little abruptly, but as Anthony writes in the Epilogue: "Real life endings are never what you expect, because those magical moments that catch us off guard can never be predicted."
And when has real life ever not caught us off guard?
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