Read Harder - ROC: A Book about War

Last week was the first meeting for the Read Harder Rochester book group! We had four whole people show up! Whoott!!

The group is new and each month we plan to get together to talk about two tasks from the challenge. This month’s categories up for discussion were: A Book about War and A LGBTQ Romance. This post is about the former.

What I Read

Ihad planned to play this category a little loosely, forgoing real war with a fictional one in a fantasy novel. However, I read A Girl at War by Sara Novic. I mentioned this last week in my outbox post, so sorry if you are following my posts so closely (HA!) that you recognize this as duplicate information. In this book we have two storylines from Anna’s life: one in 1991 when she was 10 years old and war broke out. During that year, she lost many things, including her sense of peace. The second story line is Anna as a 20-something college student in the US who has been hiding her history from every one she meets. It is her journey back to Croatia to see if she can find all that she left behind. It’s a wonderfully written book that is well worth the few hours it takes to plow through it via audiobook.

What Other People Read:

Kristi read Code Name Verity, a YA novel that she described as focusing more on the relationships between the people in the story that about war itself, which is hard for her (Kristi) to read. The war in question is WWII. This book is on my bookshelf at home (above my bed, taunting me everyday) and I’ve heard great things about it… but will I read it? Hmmmmmm.

Kelley Recommended Everyone Brave is Forgiven written by Chris Cleave. The war in the book is WWII. Cleave wrote Little Bee, which I read and loved despite it’s heart- wrenching story and characters. Kelley also recommended Harlem Hellfighters, about a historic Black regiment during WWI. I’ve added both books to  my TBR. ::shock:: Oh! She actually read 13- hours, the true account of September 11, 2012 which was recently made into a movie. She enjoyed that book, too.

Sara, who didn’t read her book for this category, is considering Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Nigozi Adiche. Excellent reviews for this book, which I also have on my shelf. Sara also enjoyed Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, a nonfiction by Mary Roach with interesting points regarding such things as the role of hearing loss and the recommendations that soldiers going to war zones get about putting their sperm in a bank “just in case.”

See my other Read Harder Roc posts: