SuitabookPurple Hearts
Michael Grant
- Reading
- As this is the trilogy’s concluding volume, consider whether the reader would benefit from knowing the earlier books’ characters and events first. If reading together, agree a pause point for checking in around the most graphic wartime passages.
- Themes
- Women’s leadership in war: Rio, Frangie and Rainy are battle-hardened women soldiers whom others look to for guidance and confidence. The story places women’s leadership within front-line combat and the pressure of wartime responsibility.
- War’s human cost: The story links military campaigns with extreme bodily suffering and the challenge of preserving belief in humanity, including in the context of concentration camps. War’s brutality and its demands on the characters’ humanity are foregrounded as part of the story’s treatment of the Second World War.
- Worth knowing
- The war is described in graphic terms, including burned bodies and torn limbs; the story also includes the devastation of concentration camps. These elements may merit checking in with a reader who finds depictions of violence or mass suffering difficult.