Review: Front Lines

Front Lines by Michael Grant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been waiting for this new Michael Grant series for a good long time - maybe since the Gone series ended, it feels like. Now that this hybrid of Agent Carter and Pearl Harbor is here, and I've read it, I can safely say that Grant's very much still got it.

For some reason, Goodreads seems to think this book is sci-fi, when it's not - because alternate history doesn't equal sci-fi, let's face it. And what an alternate history this is, where women are allowed to join the army as far back as WWII. It's unique, and uniquely interesting, and there is so much material here to fill over 500 pages.

On the one hand, the book's length, as well as its slow-moving (and that's mostly for its focus on character development and basic training) first half, made me wonder a few times, how is this going to be a series? But the ending does make it pretty clear that there will be more of these soldier girls and their harrowing war stories. The notes at the end of the book call to mind the conversation in The Winter Soldier where Nick Fury points out to Captain America that the so-called Greatest Generation did some terrible things while at war. Call me dark, call me cynical, call me Genre Savvy. But I have the nasty feeling, knowing Grant's gift for psychologically scarring his characters (and, by extension, his readers), that the sequels to Front Lines will dig deeper into that aspect of the war.

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