Fallen Angels
Walter Dean Myers
Perry
Reviews of Fallen Angels
Amazon
Customer, I am a sophomore at Clark Magnet High School and I just finished reading Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers. As a high school student I have to tell you that this is the best book that I read this year. This is also one of the best books that I have enjoyed in a very long time. I got the book from our school library and I did not think that it was going to be this good. I just checked it out and told myself that it is just a book and its going to be just like the other 90% of the books that I have read and that it is going to be boring. Little did I know that I enjoyed this book. This book is written so close to the heart. Fallen Angels if about the Vietnam War and how it was actually going on and the real truth behind the way the war was going on. This is also a story about friendship between soldiers and other personnel from the army. This book was written in so much detail that you think that you are there in the battle fighting with the enemy. This story is about the main character whose name is Richard Perry and he enlists in the army. There he meets a friend who later becomes his closest friend and his name is Peewee. At the army Peewee and Perry become close friends and they meet some other friends who are Lobel, Johnson, Brummer and their tight friendship. They get into many battles with the Vietnamese and end up losing their friends. This book shows how much of an effect the Vietnam War had on the soldiers and how they try to stick together through all the hardships. I would recommend this book to war-story fans and war-story lovers that are mature. Even though I am a little young to be reading this book it was still interesting to me. Fallen Angels contains some very graphic language that I do not think will be appropriate to teenagers under the age of seventeen. So if you like war-stories this will be a great story to start reading.
Customer, I read this book because it is an optional novel for
me to teach to my sophomores. I wasn't expecting much. I had it labelled in my mind as a "Vietnam War" book, a "boy's" book, and a "Black experience" book. What I found was a gripping novel about war and compassion, humanity and the humane. It was so great I read the whole book in one five hour sitting. Meyers uses humor at the exact moments it is needed, deftly manipulating the reader's emotions, and the character portrayals are so vivid I had the entire book cast with popular actors within a few pages! This is one of the best books I've read all year, and I'm definitely going to use it in the classroom!
Would you have wanted to be in Perry's place or would you sit back and watch on TV as the war unravels?