MMGM- On Blood Road

It's Marvelous Middle Grade Monday at Always in the Middle and #IMWAYR day at Teach Mentor Texts and Unleashing Readers. It's also Nonfiction Monday.

Watkins, Steve. On Blood Road
October 30th 2018 by Scholastic Press
Copy provided by the publisher

Taylor Sorenson is a typical rebellious teen of 1968, sneaking out of his posh apartment to hang out with friends in the Village and generally irritating his mother. When she decides to go visit his father, who works with the government and is stationed in South Vietnam where he has a major but undisclosed role in the war operations, he isn't pleased that he has to be away from his friends, but decides to make the most of his travels by sneaking away from the embassy to go to a Tet (New Year's) celebration at Bunny Bunny Go Go. Unfortunately, he is intercepted by military police, who tell him the party goers would just rob him blind, so he's better off at home. Even more unfortunately, gunfire erupts, the MPs are killed, and Taylor is held hostage by the North Vietnamese Army. He makes friends with an older man named TJ, who helps him survive initially, but who doesn't last long. Taylor eventually ends up in the care of Phuong, Trang, and Vu, who brutally march him across the countryside. Luckily, both Phuong and Taylor speak French (not unlikely in the 1960s) and are able to communicate. Phuong is fairly nice, although Trang and Vu are not, and after Taylor saves Phuong from drowning, Phuong treats him a bit better, although she is very dedicated to the reunification of Vietnam. Even though it may have cost her her entire family, Phuong believes in this mission and wants to get Taylor to the Hanoi Hilton so his presence can be used as leverage against his father. Crossing a war-torn, defoliated country side is dangerous, and Taylor and Phuong barely survive by eating snakes and other creatures they can find, often becoming violently ill. As they approach their destination, will Taylor's father's connections be able to rescue Taylor before it's too late?
Strengths: Like this author's Sink or Swim, this has a lot of good details about the gruesome fighting, devastation caused by bombing and chemical weapons, and techniques for torturing prisoners. Not details I want to read, but my readers who like books about war definitely do. I appreciate it when these details are offset by discussion of deeper philosophical ones about how to treat others (Taylor saves Phuong because, in part, it's the right thing to do. Plus, his other captors are meaner!) and the cruelty of war in general. This had a nice balance, and the structure of it will make it appeal to readers of outdoor survival adventures as well.
Weaknesses: This is petty, but a boy named Taylor is 1968 just about made me put the book down. No! He would have likely been Jim, Mike, Bob or Bill. The rest of the historical details seemed fine, but that tiny bit made me want to doubt them! More seriously, it was hard to get a good handle on Phuong's and Taylor's views of the war and how they changed, because so much was going on. That's okay-- the target demographic doesn't care so much about Taylor's relationship with his father and their differing views of the war, but I would have been interested.
What I really think: We have enough books about World War II. Really. Vietnam and Korea, and especially Desert Storm and Afghanistan need more books. The cover of this is fantastic, and I'm super glad to have a copy, since the best thing I have other than Chris Lynch's Vietnam series is Gail Graham's 1972 Cross-Fire: A Vietnam Novel (Pantheon Books).