Fallen Angels
I stayed up late last night to finish Fallen Angels, one of the books I borrowed for Banned Books Week. “Wow!” was about the only thing I could think. The ending almost got me. Earlier in the book, when the guys went into combat, I would think, “Well, Perry can’t die ’cause he’s the narrator and there’s still a lot of pages left.” With the tough situation he and Peewee get into at the end, it’s difficult to know what’s going to happen. “If this book is like some of the German fiction I’ve read,” I considered, “everyone’s going to die.” I won’t tell you the ending, but I will tell you I really enjoyed the book. I feel a certain sadness when I finish a book I’ve really enjoyed reading because I can’t read it anymore. I definitely feel that now.
I can understand why people would find this book problematic for young adults. Since it’s a book about warfare, of course there’s violence. It raises many tough issues and presents difficlt scenarios. It was tough for me as an adult to read some of the scenes. There’s racial tension and epithets alongside some swear words. The book holds a lot of merit, though, and I enjoyed Walter Dean Myers’s writing style and voice a lot.
