THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER, the Korean War should never, ever be "forgotten"

THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER
EVE J. CHUNG
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping novel about a correspondent trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean War, and the women who help her find her way home, from the national bestselling author of Daughters of Shandong.

“When I found the courage to lift my head, I expected to stare down the barrel of a gun, but instead there was a woman in front of me, the back of her white skirt embroidered with columns of yellow chrysanthemums.”

1950. It’s the coldest winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist Ellie Chang is on a military flight to cover a battle in the mountains of North Korea when her plane is shot down.

As she emerges from the fallen aircraft onto an icy field surrounded by the enemy, Ellie is sure it’s the end, certain she’ll never make it home to her parents…until a woman pushes her way through the crowd and claims Ellie as the lost daughter that she’s been searching for since the last war ended. Never mind that Ellie doesn’t speak a word of Korean.

Ellie is taken in by her rescuer—a woman who calls herself “Emma”—and the Paks, a pastor’s family. She knows she can’t stay and yet there’s no way she’ll survive on her own.

As the war intensifies, the sky alighting with bombs overhead, Ellie convinces Emma and the Paks to travel south towards an elusive promise of safety, and where Ellie insists they are more likely to find Emma’s real daughter, stuck on the other side of the frontlines.

Emma’s decision to claim Ellie, and Ellie’s choice to take her hand will connect their lives forever.

Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on a “Forgotten War,” the resilience of love within our darkest histories, and the indefatigable determination of mothers to protect their children.

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My Review: Stories with this kind of stakes, "everything changes because one moment to the next a decision is made," always appeal to me. So do stories about Korea, probably because it was my father's wartime experience. This story, then, started out with literally every advantage granted to it.

Why then is my rating so mingy?

Because the author is very, very clear on the story she wants to tell, but rather less so on the craft of storytelling. The dialogue, the scene-setting, the stakes she clearly thought through carefully, all work together. They don't cohere emotionally to punch me in the gut as I weep for the fate awaiting Emma and the Paks if they are not able to use Eleanor's Americanness to leverage an escape.

Here is my opportunity to say that Eleanor's CHINESE-Americanness rubbed a serious saddle-sore on me. Emma claiming this CHINESE-American woman as her long-lost daughter...well, no one in Korea would fall for that for a single second. Han people, assuming that's who Ellie's ancestors were which is by no means guaranteed, are visually quite distinct from the Korean people; it's very "Western" to assume there's no difference, or such a small difference as to be indistinguishable to natives of the region.

So...the story's foundation was my problem, not the story itself. The awful intersection of colonialism and its bastard child warmongering was the source of the story's impetus. As Ellie and Emma navigate their intersecting desires to leave the place they are, escaping the suite of violent terrors that war orchestrates for those who are not allowed control of their world (read: old men), they illuminate the compromises and suffering the old men in charge inflict so indifferently on the world's mass of humanity. In service of what? Does any ideology, any philosophy, justify the titanic life-altering suffering of vast numbers of people? Ellie, a war correspondent, is well placed to use the scalpel of reporting to cut away the rottenness of propaganda to expose the real wounds caused to real people. Emma's loss of her daughter to the Japanese colonialists, probably as a "comfort woman" or, more accurately, a sex slave has wounded her entire family. The author, a lawyer by trade, has clearly read Frantz Fanon ("The formula 'this all happened long ago' is substituted by that of 'we are going to speak of what happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today and it might happen tomorrow') or encountered his ideas of the artist as moral actor because this story is very much the argument for despair, and its fellow traveler inactivity, as a moral wrong.

Ellie spends part of the story in survival mode, not doing anything to actively improve her chances for escape. In this time of joining the woman who "claimed" her as a daughter, she is gathering her circle of women who share a goal of ending the harms being done; it's assembling a posse, not only sinking into a morass of misery. Going back to my foundational problem, would Emma's actual daughter need the kind of help and instruction Ellie receives all uncommented on?

It all ends up making this a three-and-a-half star read. I found the prose adequate, if unexciting; quite mannered at times thus unlikely to move me to empathetic tears. The story being told moved me to outrage and its hotter, briefer tears. Ellie...and Emma...are supremely tough women. Reading about their struggles was angering, educational, and instructive. I did not come away converted to Eve Chung fandom though I'll read another story by her. I respect her eye for what makes a good story and hope she will enter into the next one all guns blazing.

ZONE ROUGE, a novel fictionalizing a reality most of us haven't realized exists

ZONE ROUGE
MICHAEL JEROME PLUNKETT
The Unnamed Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: We are démineurs. We dismantle bombs.

Ferrand Martin and his team of démineurs spend their days in the ruined fields of Zone Rouge on the periphery of Verdun, France where they clean up the artillery and explosives used in World War I. One bullet, one bit of shrapnel, one bomb at a time. The work, they say, is not measured in days, months, or years, but in generations. It’s taken a century to get this far, and it will take many more centuries to complete.

One morning, a routine call to pick up a half-buried artillery shell turns out to be much more than just a single they discover a human skeleton, fully intact. Ferrand and his fellow démineurs dig deep into poisoned soil to reveal the past is rarely ever distant from the present.

This startling discovery kicks off a series of events that sees the usually desolate Zone Rouge teem with activity as academics, politicians, and locals all wrangle over the legacy of the War and what it means to remember. Zone Rouge is a brilliant reimagining of the Sisyphus myth suffused with our modern anxieties over war, climate, class, and the ghosts of our pasts.

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My Review: The real Red Zone, northeastern France, is still...107 years after the Armistice on 11/11/18...unavailable for human habitation, so damaged by and so dangerous from munitions and chemicals used during the battles of the day that it is still polluting the soil, the air, the water...there are areas where arsenic makes up 18% of the soil by weight in the 21st century.

The devastation has led to the abandonment of the area as a productive landscape. The démineurs ...this is a real job, there are hundreds of these men working the "Iron Harvest" from both the 20th century's great wars...have greater risks for some cancers, greater risk, obviously, of fatal accidents as is expected for those working with unexploded ordnance.

An expansion of the myth of Sisyphus, a kind of riposte to the great classic All Quiet on the Western Front, the idea of the story is the unending price paid for war. As long as most of us have never heard of le Zone Rouge, which..be honest...you hadn't before now, the consequences of stupid people wielding too much power are kept out of sight-out of mind. So reading the quotidian struggles of those who, for the sake of a job, clean up their grandparents' and great-grands' messes. To their own occasionally lethal detriment.

No matter the side, no matter the divide, no matter the outcome, the planet we depend on for our existence and are highly unlikely to stop needing for that suffers fro our greed and fecklessness. In the end we will pay for our actions, are beginning to pay for our actions even now. The author is (per his Goodreads bio) a former member of the "...Marine Corps and is a former EMT. He is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation and host of The LitWar Podcast. His writing has appeared in Wrath-Bearing Tree, The War Horse, Leatherneck Magazine, and other publications." With that CV, one can see why this is the subject he chose for his debut novel. A laser focus on the tangible costs of war has clearly guided the gentleman's course in adulthood. The reason the book is easy to read is in his ability to see the men, the actual uniform-wearing people, in the story. It gives the story its immediacy. The weakest part of this narrative is the man who runs a town in the Zone Rouge, who dreams of rebuilding it (in his own image of it, of course) in spite of hurdles both practical...aresenic-poisoned soil and unexploded ordnance do not say "bring the family to live here!"...and bureaucratic. The French government does not want the terrible optics of dead kids who played with a mine to go viral, nor does the rewilding of the areas most impacted strike them as a bad thing. Pripyat, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, is undergoing this process as well, and it's definitely having an impact on the natural world that the disaster seemed to preclude. We as a species need to learn from these terrible events, learn how best to fix the carnage we've wrought on the planet's other inhabitants. The reason Hugo, the "mayor," doesn't come off well is he is an archetype of end-stage capitalism's obscene valorization of greed, selfishness, and self-interest.

As I suspect that was the author's intent, I take no exception to Hugo's horribleness. I take mild exception to Ferrand, our main character's, Boy-Scouty, libertarian ways. That's a fast way to enable fascism's rise, as we're seeing now...so no, no fifth star on this story.

That does not mean I was not very pleased to read this book. I was engaged throughout, I was educated by the story's reason for existing...I'm one who hadn't clocked the existence of the titular zone...and I thoroughly appreciated the author's deftness at refining and re-presenting Sisyphus for this climate-changing, cleaning-up century.

A RAGE TO CONQUER: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History...not sure I agree

A RAGE TO CONQUER: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History
MICHAEL WALSH
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning author Michael Walsh looks at twelve momentous battles that changed the course of Western history.

A sequel to Michael Walsh’s Last Stands, his new book A Rage to Conquer is a journey through the twelve of the most important battles in Western history. As Walsh sees it, war is an important facet of every culture—and, for better or worse, our world is unthinkable without it. War has been an essential part of the human condition throughout history, the principal agent of societal change, waged by men on behalf of, and in pursuit of, their gods, women, riches, power, and the sheer joy of combat.

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My Review: I had a hard time with this book. It's very interesting. It's not a dry history, written to inform; it is tendentious and opinionated; it's just that I do not share the author's belief that war is anything but a curse and a cause for shame and contumely, not celebration.

Examining the careers of Achilles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Bohemond (of whom I do not recall ever hearing before now), von Clausewitz, and General George Patton, among others, the author continues the cultural valorization of men who slaughter other men in pursuit of their women, their land, or simply out of allegiance to a different "god."

Leaving aside the fact that two of the most famous of his examples...Achilles and Alexander...were famously in love with other men (Patroclus and Hephaistion), presenting these motivations as simply facts while editorializing his socks off about other things, really tips his hand as being very much in favor of this model of doing things in the world.

His opinion being at the greatest possible variance from mine, I'm not likely to offer much praise for the work. The praiseworthy things in this read are the author's evident erudition, his conscientious researching skills, and his ability to convey facts with sharp clarity.

Everything else, the jingoism, the valorization of the ugliest, most hateful parts of human nature, the reassertion (as though it's needed) that male = violent, and this is a good thing, I deplore.

Perfect in its celebration of death, gore, and unreflective immiseration of women and losers of battles, for #Deathtober. I recommend its ghoulish, violence-delighting, heteronormative nightmare of a world to anyone needing evidence for why no "devil" can ever scare me half as much as a human being.