Front Lines- Michael Grant

Front Lines- review

Michael Grant

Rating: 5/5

The short version: It’s a challenging project, but Grant follows it through wholeheartedly, and it pays off.

This review contains spoilers. It also mentions racist language and behaviour and (feared) sexual assault.

Only a very, very brave author would take on such a huge challenge as writing an alternative history of WWII. In fact, there are only a few authors who I’d trust enough to read if they did it. Michael Grant is one of those authors. His Gone series is still compelling even though I’ve read it quite a few times, and his balance of strong character development, exciting action sequences and emotional heart makes a perfect combination in Front Lines.

The concept of the books is exciting. It’s the story of the WWII we know, but with a difference: girls are in active service, too. It opens with a foreword from a mystery narrator and goes on to tell the tales of three girls (Rio, Frangie and Rainy) as they become part of the war. They go from innocent trainees to true, battle-hardened veterans- but none of them ever lose their humanity. And they all do just as good a job as the men do.

For me, one of the best things about Front Lines was that Grant doesn’t just focus on soldiers- that’s what Rio becomes, but Frangie is a medic, and Rainy is a spy. From a technical stance, it makes their viewpoints easy to tell apart, and keeps the story varied- which makes the novel enjoyable, but that’s not why it’s one of the best things about it. It’s that Grant makes the reader care for a huge variety of characters. These women are all individuals, with their own skills and motivations, and yet I cared for them all equally deeply.

Grant doesn’t shy away from the reality of 1940s behaviour, either. It might have been easier to pretend that in a world where white and black women could join the army, racism and sexism were no longer problems. But that would have been unrealistic, and diminished the power of the book. Especially considering that this is the world where the Holocaust is just becoming a murmur. Even very first pages of the book, Rio comments that “men do not cry”. Luther Geer, a soldier fighting alongside Rio, repeatedly makes his contempt for women and Japanese soldiers clear, and when she is captured by Germans Frangie is afraid of not just death but rape. And yet, Frangie keeps treating her patients anyway, and Rio proves herself to be a better soldier than Geer will ever be. I’m not sure they wouldn’t face the same problems in society today, but I do know that they are an excellent reminder that discrimination has no place in any society.

A significant amount of time is also devoted to developing the relationships between the women, something which can be missing from supposedly feminist literature. The friendship between Rio and Jenou is an obvious example right from their first scenes together. Jenou is loud but kind-hearted, and she can make Rio smile even after her sister’s death. Their relationship (as friends) changes as the war goes on and changes them, but they can always make each other laugh. I loved the continuity of that portrayal, and it was friendships like that that really sunk home the emotional depth of the book. A book about soldiers has to rely on friendships, and Grant knows how to write this perfectly.

And then they get to the war, and the first action scenes are just as shocking for the reader as for the characters, even though we know it’s coming. The dialogue becomes hastier and the characters I had grown to love were in danger right from the first few minutes of conflict. One of the most powerful sentences in the book is when a character dies with no chance to say anything but “oh”, and Grant emphasises this with the sentence “Just that. Oh.” It’s short and it’s brutal and it’s real, and I didn’t stop worrying about the characters for the rest of the book. In fact, since it’s the first book of a trilogy, I don’t think I have stopped worrying about them.

Normally, at this point, I would criticise something about the book. With Front Lines, I probably could find something, but it’s not worth the effort. There is a lot more to mention about it: its intriguing narrative frame, its compelling secondary characters, how Grant manages to make three separate stories run at the same pace. But it would just be more of me saying that it’s good; instead, all I’m going to say is go and find out how good it is for yourself.