Porter is driven by his mission to protect the local Iraqis, while Sergeant Chambers, a hardened veteran of four tours, is assigned to his unit to guide the withdrawal process. It’s set near the end of the occupation, as the U.S. But the scope is vastly different: While Kaboom brought the reader fully and compellingly into the present-day reality of the ground occupation in Iraq, Youngblood is a novel obsessed with the past, looking through a far wider lens. Seen through the eyes of new lieutenant Jack Porter, Youngblood inherits a similar immediate, deadpan first-person voice, and shares with Kaboom some of the stellar details of the Iraqi desert towns and the world of the base camp-whether it’s the visceral charge of combat or a private reading St. Raised in Reno, Nevada, and now living in Brooklyn, Gallagher is an Iraq veteran-his first book, Kaboom, is a memoir that grew out of the blog he kept during his deployment (and which was subsequently shut down by the U.S. The legacy of the Iraq War and its resurgence in the national conversation, especially now in the midst of a particularly charged and vitriolic election year, are among the urgent and resonant questions of Youngblood (Atria), a smart and riveting new novel by Matt Gallagher, set in the fictional town of Ashuriyah. It was 13 years ago tomorrow that a U.S.-led coalition launched a series of airstrikes in Iraq, dubbed “Shock and Awe,” which triggered the beginning of the near-decade-long war.
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