The Outside Reading Book that I selected is titled Fallen Angels. The book was written by Walter Dean Myers. The story takes place in the year 1967, and is about a black seventeen year-old from Harlem, named Richie Perry, who joins the United States Army. Richie is soon sent off to fight in Vietnam, where he meets and becomes friends with another soldier named Harold “Peewee” Gates. Apart from Peewee and Richie, the main characters are Monaco, an Italian, Lobel, a Jew, Johnson, an unusually strong black soldier, Sergeant Simpson, an intelligent and brave leader, and Captain Stewart, a greedy and selfish commander. Richie struggles with the difficulties of war, and, although he is only seventeen, he is quickly forced to transition to manhood.
Fallen Angels is told in first person point of view through the eyes of the protagonist, Richie Perry. Throughout the story, Myers effectively utilizes literary devices such as foreshadowing, imagery, and symbolism. An example of foreshadowing in the story was when Richie’s medical file was incorrectly processed, and although he acquired a knee injury playing basketball, he is still forced to be part of the combat. This hints that many things in the war may turn out to be much different than he originally expected. One example of imagery was on page 40, when it says, “There was a shard of metal protruding from Jenkins’ chest. The blood gurgled out of the wound it made and sprayed along the concave metallic surface. He tried to bring his hand to it, to touch it. A medic had reached him and pushed his hand away. Jenkins’ face was white and twisted as he struggled to look down at his wound. There were bubbles on his wound as he struggled for a final breath, and then that, too, stopped.” One example of symbolism is the dog tags that were lost in the fire when the bodies of the dead soldiers were burned. Those dog tags symbolized the lives of the soldiers, and how they were lost, almost without any meaning.
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