Walter Dean Myers/Morpurgo

Finished the M's! Wheee! Now I can finally read all of the Naylor Alice books in order. (While I was shelf reading yesterday, I added numbers to the spines of some series, which will help a lot.)

Myers' The Glory Field (1994) was good but a bit confusing. Well, not so much confusing as not satisfying. It was interesting to follow the members of one family through five generations, but I would just get into the story and it ended. I was particularly interested in one woman in 1930's Chicago who set up her own cosmetics business, but even when we meet her again in the '90's, all we here is that since mainstream manufacturers were embracing the African American market, her business is down and she's had to go into real estate. At 86? Still, for students interested in the African American experience, this is a good read.

Fallen Angels (1988) is a good Vietnam Conflict (although I think it's been upgraded to a war in the last 10 years.) book, but has a lot of the f-word in it. Sigh. I don't care if they actually use language like that in the army. They shouldn't. You use language like that, and you can drop and give me ten. Anyway, it has enough of the battle scenes and living conditions, and of course shows the horror of war. This is why I never understand the little War Mongering Boys who want to read about the war. None of the books I've come across make war sound like a good idea. So why does war still appeal to them?

With that in mind, Michael Morpurgo's Private Peaceful (2003) is not going to do it for this crowd. There is some battle coverage, but a good half of the book is flashbacks of his life, and this will lose the boys by page five. Drat.