Review: Purple Hearts

Purple Hearts by Michael Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's hard to put into words the impact of this, the final book in Michael Grant's Front Lines trilogy. I expected Purple Hearts to be the most harrowing book in the series just from the title alone, and on that front my expectations were met. Over the course of yet another expansive 500-plus-page book, Grant takes us and his soldier girl cast through 1944 and beyond. As battle-hardened as Rio, Frangie, Rainy, Jenou, et al. have become in the last couple of years, the war still has ways of pulling the last vestiges of innocence out of them all. Not only from their wartime experiences, but more than ever, it hits home that an alternate history, nearly identical to our world but for allowing women to fight in the American armed forces several decades earlier than in reality, still suffers from too many flaws. Truly, there's no easy answer to the question of how someone can fight for a country and society despite that same society having it out for them on many levels - more for some than others, because intersectionality, of course.

But still, the war hits hard. D-Day, the Hürtgen forest (so negligibly covered in the history books, I think this might have been my first time ever hearing about it just from reading this book), the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Berlin, and the camps. Those hit hardest by far, making it all the more cathartic every time one of our soldier girls (particularly Rainy) takes out some Nazi enemies. And then the passage through the German countryside, where one has to wonder how much blame to place on everyday German civilians who stood by while the Nazis committed all their atrocities.

Many of Grant's past books have been darker than dark, though these have often been tempered by sheer entertainment value (the Gone series especially comes to mind). Even the first book of this series caught my attention just for its high-concept premise, for which I believe I compared it to Pearl Harbor and Agent Carter both. With Purple Hearts, though, it's clear that this book isn't meant for entertainment as much as for education. And not just an extended history lesson either, but a brutal reminder that fighting for one's ideals might well be the one way to keep them from being lost forever. And that it's one's duty to fight for those ideals even if they seem unattainable. Even if your society utterly fails to practice what it preaches, you'd be far better for being among the few who do practice, rather than let the whole thing fall apart just because it's nowhere near close to a more perfect union.

I get the feeling Purple Hearts is Grant's most personal book ever, and it's a shame I'm seeing few people reading it. It's the furthest thing from an easy read there is, but it's all worth it in the end when you finish the last page and realize there's still hope for us after all, somewhere, some way.

No matter what the fascists would have you believe.

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