Battle Fatigue

Kurlansky shifts gears—not entirely successfully—from nonfiction (Salt) and adult literature (Boogaloo on Second Avenue) to YA fiction. Joel Bloom, a Jewish boy in post-WWII Massachusetts, grows up playing war games and cheering on the Brooklyn Dodgers. As the book follows him from age seven into adulthood, his interest in baseball never wanes, but he slowly starts to realize that he’s opposed to the growing Vietnam conflict that is consuming his generation. His moral evolution is affected by his teachers in high school and college, news reports, and stories from older friends who have joined the military, but it’s his college girlfriend, Rachel, who draws Joel fully into the antiwar movement. Kurlansky uses an uneasy mix of diary entries and first-person, present-tense flashbacks, which are largely indistinguishable from each other, to create a disaffected narrative voice that warps through the years and events of Joel’s life; the occasional bit of poetic pretentiousness—“Bobby Kennedy’s death was the final death of wounded hope”—offers some variety. Likewise, the rushed ending feels anticlimactic and robs the book of genuine pathos. Ages 12–up. (Oct.)