Book Review: Fallen Angels
Rated by 3 members
What Parents Should Know
Describes what it was like for American soldiers fighting in
Vietnam in 1967-68. Profanity, poor grammar, and graphic
violence add to the realism of the portrayals.
The story builds until the soldiers and readers are caught in a vortex of war. The realism, humor, and intensity attract even reluctant readers, and keep them reading.
Common Sense Media Review
This highly realistic depiction of young soldiers fighting
the ground war in Vietnam was one of the first books to
illuminate that war for young people. Today's adolescents, who
were born after the Vietnam War, see it as history, if they
know anything about it at all.
Walter Dean Myers tells the story through the eyes of an eighteen-year old African-American soldier who really doesn't know much about the war when he arrives. Harlem-born Richie quickly becomes friends with Pee-Wee, who is from Chicago. Pee-Wee pulls plenty of humorous stunts, but Myers reveals both young men as sensitive and vulnerable, despite Pee-Wee's surface toughness.
The book focuses on the experience of the soldiers, not on the history of the war. Richie and Pee-Wee really know nothing about the larger picture, and they don't understand the protests against the war that occur in America. Their goal is their own survival, threatened by the Viet Cong and by their own captain, who sends them on far too many missions in his effort to achieve an enemy body count high enough to win his promotion to major.
Readers may need to be reminded that this is a novel, not a true story. Myers has the ability to make readers care about his characters and see them as real human beings. Reading FALLEN ANGELS can be an intense experience, one that even reluctant readers may appreciate.
Myers writes a similar treatment of World War II in The Journal of Scott Pendleton Collins. For another honest but easier-to-read look at war, read Gary Paulsen's Soldier's Heart.
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