Michael Pitre's debut novel, Fives and Twenty-Fives, follows three men from a road repair platoon in Iraq, alternating among their first-person voices, switching between the present--when each man has either returned home or tried to create a new one--and their far more vivid past in the war zone.
Lieutenant Donovan is the platoon's leader, "A real southern college boy.... Like he was on his way to an outdoor jam band festival one day, took a wrong turn, and somehow ended up in the Marines." Corpsman Lester "Doc" Pleasant, from the wrong side of the tracks, discovers a gift for medical work. The platoon's losses hit him hard. Their "terp," or interpreter, is a Baghdadi university student code-named Dodge ("a dependable car"), who carries a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his back pocket.
The quiet pathos of war, its aftermath and the inability of a tone-deaf society to relate to those affected by it are rendered with poignancy and stark honesty. The characters are not perfect, but demand our compassion for their very reality. We are lucky to have such a fine voice as Michael Pitre's to tell this story in one of the best novels to come out of the Iraq war. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia