Rach's Reading Club

I decided to read my first miltary book as "The Last Heroes" by W.E.B. Griffin. It turns out that it's actually the first book in a series and that begs the question of whether to it can stand alone as a novel without the later books. The answer is "almost, but not quite".

The novel takes place in the early days of World War II and revolves around the United States attempting to acquire enough Uranium for the first atomic bomb. To do this they want to abduct a French mining engineer from Morocco. That's the closest thing this book has to a main plot. But if the book only consisted of what was necessary to tell that story, I think the book would barely be novella, not a 300 plus page novel.

The book spends a lot more time on characters. The main character is a reckless adventurer pilot named Canidy, who is the key person in this mission. Canidy, predictably has buddy named Bitter--I thought that was a strange name for a character. Bitter is a much more conservative by the book kind of pilot.

But Bitter, not Canidy, gets a girl pregnant shortly before the war starts and, come to think of it, when the novel ends, he still doesn't know about it. Also that pregnant girl has a best friend who's trying to make it as a news reporter. An interesting character, but so far, completely extraneuos to the story.

Overall, the book is an enjoyable read. Although some parts of it get bogged down with technical details and the alphabet soup of describing military hardware. I'm actually a little divided on whether to read the next book in the series or move on to other things.




{image:191126