The Book Club: The Yellow Birds of Alaska

2 "books" with one stone... awful pun I know. Anyway, time to catch you all up with my reading habits, so this week the staring books are: Looking For Alaska by John Green (but you all knew that), and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.

Looking For Alaska:
John Green has done it again, and produced one of the most heart wrenching stories I have ever read... I read it in one evening so about 3hrs, I just couldn't put it down. You want to know what happens before, and what happens after the incident. Pudge is the sort of character that I would be happy to be in life, although I somehow doubt I will be, he feels like a real person to me. The day after I read this I found myself worrying about him and the others despite knowing he isn't real.

The Yellow Birds:
Not as addictive, but just as good. I found it both informative and the perfect answer to "What was it like over there?". I don't think anyone else from the armed forces could have produced such a emotional yet detached response to the war in Iraq.
The marching cadence quoted before the book starts is where the novel gets it's name, and it is hardly surprising given the nature of this book, full of promises broken and unbroken you begin to see why soldiers are treated like heroes when they come back, yet they are always modest. Powers wrote my book of the summer, read on the way back from London, my final holiday before the homework started again in the final panic before college.

If you have read either of these books let me know what you thought in the comments, if you haven't read one or both of them ASAP!

xoxo Miriam