![]() We get almost half way through the book before “fallen angels” are referred to. His adventures through the selection and training processes are chronicled with quite readable dialogue. He believes that the military just might be a way out of town. Meyers begins as Perry finishes high school and realizes that there is no money in the family for college and that the mean streets hold no future. Yet it is a story free of the angst, bitterness, hatred, and racism so often found in other novels dealing with the same theme ![]() It’s a story told by a young black man in a predominately black unit in a decidedly racially mixed war. Though there are a few mechanical and continuity errors-including weapon caliber and nomenclature-Myers gives us a compact, easy-to-read book. ![]() But we easily understand the stories of main character Richie Perry and his comrades who serve in an unidentified unit in Vietnam. In the book, names have been changed to protect the innocent. ![]() While written in the first-person and appearing at first glance to be autobiographical, the story is actually a tribute to Myers’ brother, Thomas Wayne “Sonny” Myers, who died in Vietnam in 1968 and to whom the book is dedicated. The late Walter Dean Myers’ acclaimed 1988 Young Adult Vietnam War novel, Fallen Angels (Scholastic, 336 pp., $9.99, paper), is today being featured as assigned reading in high school English, history, and social studies classes across the nation. ![]()
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