Sarah's Reviews > Matterhorn

I know I am reading something great when I think about it when I’m not reading it. This is masterfully written, bringing the characters to life clearly, which is crucial in this type of narrative (if we didn’t care this book would be nothing). I’m not sure if this was the author’s intention but I feel this highlights the futility of war, showing the characters as behaving honorably without an honorable objective at their core. It frustrates me that this was only the beginning of the war, and parallels to modern times are unavoidable.

I am not great at visualizing, so some of the scenes are hard for me to follow. I’m not necessarily interested in reading about all men, although the author compensated for that and made me care. And there are a lot of slurs, particularly against Vietnamese people. I didn’t like the slurs, but they almost reinforced the anti-war themes for me, showing how political battles pit people against each other for little reason.