Purple Hearts

By Michael Grant

Third and final instalment of this critically acclaimed young adult alternative historical series that began with Front Lines and Silver Stars

It's 1944, and it feels to everyone like the war will never end. Rio Richlin, Frangie Marr and Rainie Shulterman have all received accolades, been 'heroes', earned promotion – in short, they've all done 'enough' to allow them to leave this nightmare and go home. But they don't.

D-Day, June 6th 1944. On that day, many still doubted the American soldier.

By June 7th no one did.

Michael Grant has lived an exciting, fast-paced life. He moved in with his wife Katherine after only twenty-four hours. He has co-authored over 160 books for teenagers, young adults and adults, including the bestselling GONE series, but promises that everything he writes is like nothing you’ve ever read before. He considers the Front Lines series to be his best work yet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Feb 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780316567

Michael Grant

Michael Grant is the evil genius of Young Adult Fiction. Among his biggest fans is Stephen King who called the GONE series ‘A driving, torrential narrative’. Michael’s life has been similarly driving and torrential. He’s lived in almost 50 different homes in 14 US states, and moved in with his wife, Katherine Applegate, after knowing her less than 24 hours.

Reviews for Purple Hearts

[billiebook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This has been on my TBR since it came out and I finally got around to reading it. It took me forever to build up the courage, because I'd really grown to care about these characters and the series is set during WWII, so I just knew one of them was going to die and I just knew it was going to be Frangie. Thankfully, Frangie did not end up a fatality. Plenty of others did, some of whom readers had known since Front Lines and some of whom were introduced in this volume.

Because this is a WWII-set series and because these young women (and men) are serving on the front lines of that war, there is a lot of description of battle and wounds and other horrors of war and I get why that is necessary. But, to me, the section of the book devoted to the D Day landing at Omaha Beach went on too long, especially when compared to the brevity of the section on the liberation of the camps. I am not saying that the section on the camps needed to be longer, but if the horrors of what happened there could be conveyed in a relatively few pages, perhaps the horror and madness of D Day could have been, as well.

That, though, is my only real complaint. Otherwise, I found this to be a very satisfying conclusion to the series.