Purple Heart

Product Description taken from amazon.com

When Private Matt Duffy wakes up in an army hospital in Iraq, he's honored with a Purple Heart. But he doesn't feel like a hero.

There's a memory that haunts him: an image of a young Iraqi boy as a bullet hits his chest. Matt can't shake the feeling that he was somehow involved in his death. But because of a head injury he sustained just moments after the boy was shot, Matt can't quite put all the pieces together.

Eventually Matt is sent back into combat with his squad—Justin, Wolf, and Charlene—the soldiers who have become his family during his time in Iraq. He just wants to go back to being the soldier he once was. But he sees potential threats everywhere and lives in fear of not being able to pull the trigger when the time comes. In combat there is no black-and-white, and Matt soon discovers that the notion of who is guilty is very complicated indeed.

National Book Award Finalist Patricia McCormick has written a visceral and compelling portrait of life in a war zone, where loyalty is valued above all, and death is terrifyingly commonplace.


Purple Heart was also a book on the war in Iraq like Sunrise Over Fallujah, but I enjoyed this book much more than I did Sunrise Over Fallujah. The storyline was easier for me to read and become involved in, because it seems to have more emotion involved. It also seems as if there is more self discovery in this book as compared to Sunrise Over Fallujah. The overall story was interesting, easy to connect with, and suspenseful as you see the real story unfold. It managed to show how a soldier in Iraq would fell through such events without making it too graphic for the younger reader. This would be a great book to have in a High School library, especially for use in support groups for children of injured soldiers to give them insights into TBI.