All Quiet on the Western Front is a WWI story. A Great War story, told from the point of view of a teenaged German soldier. A story of death and horrific destruction, a story of young boys who never have a chance to become even young men. A story of what war steals from you, the holes that its nonsensical violence will rip in your soul that cannot be mended rightly. A story of what it means to be comrades in arms, about what time in the trenches together can do to bond two people. It is, from beginning to end, a story about the kind of death that makes one question everything about life.
Upsetting? Yes. So very upsetting. It is GRAPHIC, as you can imagine, and not for the faint of heart. For myself, I'm actually glad I chose to get into the heart of this novel in this form instead of reading the actual novel. It's so much to process, so painful to think of these boys who left their mothers to fight in a war, without any other life experience to shore them up. The illustrator does a really solid job of giving you a sense of how sometimes these soldiers are like old men and sometime they are just boys. The text flows well and even though I have never learned anything about this book before, I followed it easily and was moved, so moved, by the tragedy of it all.
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