“Sunrise Over Fallujah,” by Walter Dean Myers, $17.99. This unflinching novel lays out the unique combination of terror and tedium that defines a modern war zone. Protagonist Robin Perry is the Harlem- born nephew of the man whose Vietnam service formed Myers’ novel “Fallen Angels.” Robin joins the Army in 2003 “to stand up for my country” following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Like most people at the time, he assumes that Iraqis will capitulate perhaps even before the imminent military invasion.
He learns otherwise when friends from the 507th Maintenance Company become prisoners of war, their terrified faces frozen on Iraqi television. Robin’s confidence in the infantry falters when U.S. gunners shoot an unarmed adolescent Iraqi boy. Confused, he watches military superiors pay off the mourning families of dead Iraqi children: “I didn’t feel good about it . . . We couldn’t buy an end to their grieving.” His sympathy dissipates when, during a night search of an Iraqi home, a buddy discovers detonators hidden in the kitchen flour bin.
“There’s a distance between what my brain says I’m doing, and what I’m feeling inside,” Robin writes, summarizing a universal sentiment about the indefinable quagmire in Iraq. Ages 12 and up.
“How to Be Bad,” by E. Lockhart, Sarah Mlynowski and Lauren Myracle, $16.99. Three high school girls — wild child Vicks, her well-off friend Jesse and their slightly officious colleague Mel — take off on a road trip to check up on Vicks’ oddly silent college boyfriend.
Narrating in turn, each girl confides her own fears and hopes, along with her shrewd (and sometimes shrewish) assessment of the others.
Mel, the sanctimonious Christian (a part written, surprisingly, by “ttyl” author Myracle), finds herself rethinking her judgmental reflexes, and the others find themselves reconsidering their assumptions as well. It’s not really an instructive manual on how to be bad, but more about dipping a toe in the riptide and having second thoughts. Ages 13 and up.
“13 Reasons Why,” by Jay Asher, $16.99. Adolescent suicide is a staggering, and staggeringly prevalent, problem. By the time they’re 19, most teenagers will know of peers who took their own lives.
The legacy of those deaths is a giant question. Asher attempts to answer it in this novel, told as a suicide note/postmortem.
A box of cassette tapes, recorded prior to her suicide by a student named Hannah, makes predesignated rounds of 13 others. The tapes chronicle the circumstances preceding Hannah’s suicide, relentlessly detailing the actions, both deliberate and thoughtless, that led to her death. It’s a thoughtful illustration of consequences. Ages 9 and up.
“How to Build a House,” by Dana Reinhardt, $15.99. Young Harper joins a Habitat for Humanity-type construction project rebuilding a home devastated by a Tennessee tornado. The nuts and bolts (or beams and trusses) of house-building play a very distant second to Harper’s conflict over her father’s recent divorce and her own attraction to an engaging work project colleague. Ages 12 and up.
“Jessie’s Mountain,” by Kerry Madden, $16.99. The final installment in Madden’s engaging trilogy about an impoverished Smoky Mountain is funny, tender and charming. The story finishes with young Livy Two discovering, through an old diary, the hopeful girl that her mother once was, and Livy Two’s own attempts to cut the bonds of childhood. Ages 9 and up.
“The Trials of Katie Hope,” by Wick Downing, $16. The combination of wit and an antiquated territorial law make fictional Katie, age 14, the youngest lawyer in Colorado. She partners with her aged grandfather to defend a migrant worker framed as a thief, and to exonerate a dog accused of attacking a baby. The author is a Denver lawyer. Ages 12 and up.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it listed an incorrect title for the book by Kerry Madden. “Jessie’s Mountain” is correct.
