The Western Front

April 1, 2012

Gr 5-9-In each volume, text overviews and photos bookend three graphic-novel formatted stories that focus on individuals involved in specific actions and/or conflicts. Although there are several different artists, the fairly realistic artwork is consistent among the books, depicting plenty of gunfire and explosions with some bloodshed but nothing gory. The viewpoints are largely from the perspectives of American, British, and German characters with only one Soviet and no Japanese or Italian characters. The lack of citations for the stories make it hard to determine how much is drawn from first-person accounts and how much is fictional. These quibbles aside, the tales should give readers a different view of the war while the overviews provide solid facts.

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