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The Road to Afghanistan

de Linda Granfield

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A moving tribute to all the soldiers who have served with the Canadian Forces.
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I was expecting a lot more from this picture book for older children. It is the story of a modern-day Canadian Forces soldier injured in Afghanistan by an IED. The actual identity of the soldier and the nature of the injury are not revealed until the end. This is a surprise and one of the book's positive features.

The Road to Afghanistan is also the story of soldiering in the generations of one Canadian family. The narrator's great-grandfather, a farm-boy from Alberta, went off to the Great War, a grandfather fought the good fight in the least morally ambiguous of recent wars: World War II, and now the soldier has returned from Afghanistan, forced by injury to take a new road in life.

Don't get me wrong: the bare bones of a good story are here. However, the author skirts around a modern day soldier's motivations for joining the military at all. The soldier/narrator says that the reasons for enlisting are "a story in themselves"--a tantalizing, but unsatisfactory aside to the reader. From what a number of military people have told me, it seems that many join when young and at loose ends. Wouldn't it have been interesting if Granfield had explored an idea like this with kids?! Instead we have yet another story of a sacrifice made--and for what?

I can't help reading any war-themed book for children (or adults for that matter) without thinking of eminent Jungian psychologist James Hillman's remark "Ah war...how we love it." It just wouldn't go on if we didn't love it. In his book A Terrible Love of War, Hillman describes how war provides people with a sense of moral clarity and purpose--a sense of the heroic. Until something else can fill that psychological need, I suspect it'll just go on and on.

The Road to Afghanistan could have been a good deal better if the author had had the courage to reveal something of the young soldier's (possibly confused reasons) for joining up.

Having said all of this, this book might be a good discussion starter in a Canadian upper elementary classroom. No doubt it will be read in all kinds of Canadian classrooms right before Remembrance Day. And so it goes.

I should add that I'm a big admirer of Granfield's other nonfiction works on Canada's role in the big wars of the last century. I feel, however, that she missed the mark here. I hope she tries another fiction piece for kids that will actually address some of the thornier issues ( )
  fountainoverflows | Aug 30, 2014 |
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