In our June 2023 episode of Our Reading Life, Tanya mentioned that she was reading Jennifer A. Nielsen’s Lines of Courage and loving it. I tried to find it, but it wasn’t easy to do for less than twenty dollars. It is a new enough book that it is only available in hardcover, and the paperback isn’t due to come out until February, 2024. I thought I would just wait on this one until I could get it for our library. But then a patron read it and wanted to talk about it. Motivated, I got the Audible version and enjoyed it so much that I ordered an expensive copy. Interestingly, Tanya and I loved the book, but some of our friends were less impressed with it. My patron enjoyed it, until the end. She felt like the end was just too unbelievable. I think that this one might make a good podcast book club because I thought the ending was interesting and plausible.
“Lines of Courage was partly inspired by my interest in a war that I never completely understood. Yet the more I learned, the more I wanted to tell this story from a wider perspective. Part of the difficulty in understanding WWI is that there was no central issue that all countries were fighting for. Some fought for power, others to support an allied country. And others still for revenge, or for national pride, or to gain land that they felt should belong to them. There is also a challenge in that many of the countries involved no longer exist or now exist with different borders . . . it is further important to acknowledge that the world itself was rapidly changing . . .” – Jennifer A. Nielsen, Author’s Note
In Lines of Courage Nielsen treats us to a story of five teenagers from five different countries who are coming of age while their nations are at war. When the story opens, Jewish Felix Baum’s father is part of the security detail for the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo. Young Felix is accompanying his father on what was supposed to be an uneventful trip. Within a few paragraphs, however, a Serbian patriot successfully assassinates the Archduke and his wife, and Felix and his father flee home. A few months later, the Germany-backed Austro-Hungarian Empire declares war on Serbia. Serbia is backed by the Russians, Belgians, French, and the United Kingdom. Felix’s father is sent to the Eastern front, and it does not go well at all.
When Russia takes hold of Felix’s home in Lemberg, Felix and his mother try to escape to Vienna. Despite being Jewish, they are more concerned about the Russian hatred of Jews than the Germans. With the help of their German friends, the Drexlers, they attempt a daring escape. Elsa Drexler’s father is a German Major who has a significant part to play in this story.
British Kara Webb and her mother live in a small English coastal town with military hospitals where soldiers are sent once they are evacuated from the battlefield. Kara’s father was killed in the war, and her mother is working as a nurse in the hospitals. We discover, however, that she has been recruited by the Red Cross to work on the ambulance train that runs in France. Kara and her mother will spend the rest of the war on that train caring for the wounded.
Juliette Caron’s family was expelled from their French home in Lille, France when her father was taken hostage by the Germans and their home was commandeered. When we meet them, they live in Verdun and are hurriedly packing to leave before the armies arrive. A wrong turn on the road and the family and all of their possessions are overtaken by the German army. Juliette is separated from her family and spends the rest of the war trying to stay alive and find them.
Dimitri Petrenko is a fourteen-year-old Russian farm boy who was conscripted into the army. Sent to the trenches near Verdun, Dimitri is like many of his fellow Russian soldiers and was never issued a weapon or even a helmet. Instead, these boys and men live in the trenches and are sent into battle, being forced to scrounge for weapons off of dead soldiers before they themselves are shot.
Nielsen makes us care about each of these characters, and she connects them in ways that were, to me, plausible and interesting. I am the product of the schools of my time, and I was taught next to nothing about WWI. This book gave me a fascinating look into this confusing and tragic war. Like Nielsen’s other books that I have read, this book is squeaky clean, historically interesting, and well-told. I think that this could be a wonderful teen book club because there are a lot of layers to all of this.