Book: Lines of Courage by Jennifer A. Nielsen
Genre: MG Historical Fiction
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
This was last month's book club book as part of our Utah Book Month. Does anyone remember when we used to have a whole month celebrating our Utah authors? And a bunch of us bloggers hosted it? Yeah, good times, those. Anyway, we like to give a nod to those memories and still read a Utah author in our book club. It's great!
One of our favorite Utah authors is Jennifer Nielsen. She's pretty awesome, both as an author AND a person. So she often ends up on our lists. There are so many books to choose from. Personally, I'm way behind in keeping up with her.
She has a line of historical fiction books so we ended up choosing one of those. This one tells the stories of five different kids during WWI, from all their points of view and ends up weaving their stories together in a really interseting way. We have the boy who witnessed the Archduke's asscination, the girl who is trying to become a nurse like her mom, the girl who is the son of German military leader, and the Russian boy fighting on the front lines. I found all their stories to be quite compelling and hopeful.
I mostly had a problem feeling like, could kids really do these things? It was hard for me to imagine. I know others in our book club had issues with how sweetly and neatly everything was wrapped up and how it all worked out so well. Granted, this is for a MG audience, but I do agree that everything seemed a bit too perfect.
That being said, I still enjoyed reading about all these kids and look forward to trying to catch up with all the other books of hers that I have yet to read! I do wish there were more like The False Prince though. That one still remains my favorite!