Brilliant plot, impeccable twist. I really loved the characterisation too. 5 stars, favourite of the year.

This was a sad and vivid description of a ordinary boy who signed up to,fight the Germans.
He was not a killer and just thought it was then correct thing to do for his country. He left his bride and went to,fight.
It is a total and sad description of his time fighting the Germans which was awful. He came home a. Broken man, but with the love of his wife he tried to fight his nightmares. By running away and meeting the man from his. Nightmares he tries to find his way home .
A very well written book,

This started a bit slow for me. I didn’t really care for the characters and their story seemed like one I’d heard before as he went off to war.... young love, parents didn’t approve, difference in religion (race, ethnicity etc). And the part about his being Jewish wasn’t as much a clincher for me as it was just sort of odd. The war comes and goes, some part were better than others. I honestly thought about abandoning this book, it took me a while to finish. But I’m glad I finished. This has an expected turn then continues to ramp up to a quite expected ending. I was honestly pleasantly surprised. Way more often than not the ending of a book kills it, but this was the complete opposite, this ending gave redemption and was certainly where the interest of this whole story lies.

I wanted to really like this book but found it didn't quite hit the mark for me. We meet Aaron at the beginning of the book. He is gentle soul who you can't help liking but against his family's wishes he feels the pull to join up during WWII. His experiences in the war are rushed through just to help us know why he became like he did. It felt too rushed though and I think it lost something. I understand that the war in which the title is talking about isn't the battles he fought in Europe but the personal battles he had to face afterward but I think it would have been nice for the book to have been extended a bit so that we could have walked that road a little more with him.
I think it is so important to understand the mental and emotional toll war can take on a people. It is so easy to only see the physical scars but so many of the damages of war are unseen. I was grateful for that focus in the story and that he was able to start to heal. I just would have like to have a little more time with the story rather than having been rushed through so much.

An unglamorous and comprehensive look at WWII through the life of Aaron Vanko. This composite begins with Aaron, an Iowa farm boy, a senior in high school. He is caught up in war fever, and, despite the objections of his parents, and he joins his two friends, Tony and Fritz, as they enlist. He marries his best girl, Mary, before he leaves, despite the disapproval of both sets of parents.

Unlike many war stories, this novel in three parts, follows Aaron through enlistment, marriage and boot camp; then the horrors of the march through France, freezing cold, subsistence rations and the Battle of the Bulge, when only Mary's letters sustain him; and, finally, the readjustment from military back to civilian life.

This remarkable book offers a most realistic look at the effects of war on the soldier, but also on his family, friends, and fellow recruits.

I read this EARC courtesy of NetGalley and Books Go Social. pub date 02/24/18