Saturday Review: “The Battle Inside” a review by Meagan Lucas of Still Come Home (2019) by Katey Schultz in NCLR Online 2021
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Schultz’s military novel won the 2020 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Lucas wrote in her review, “To label this book as a “war novel” ignores its depth and resonance. It is about battles, but not those won or lost on the ground, rather those waged inside our hearts and minds. Still Come Home is a story of desire and shame, loneliness, redemption, and atonement, and it will leave you thinking about it for weeks after.”
Lucas gives no spoilers, instead focusing on introducing the three main characters to the story. Each has been impacted by the war in Afghanistan. She wrote, “We are able to know these characters through their small moments, through their burdens, shame, guilt, and isolation. But we also learn much about the individual devastation of the bigger picture of war, that “war only works in service of itself” (221), as we watch this huge machine roll over soldiers and civilians alike. The reader is taken not only to war-torn Afghanistan, but into themselves, to the battle where their own shame, loneliness, and desire reside, and they are asked
to question their understanding of “other” and if we are all not so different after all.”
Read the entire review here. Order the book on Bookshop.org or get it from your local independent bookstore.
