Red Badge of Courage

This is a male novel. The youth/ soldier/ main character, Henry Fleming is excited to fight in the Civil War and to be a war hero. He runs off in his first battle when he thinks they are losing only to find that they won that battle and he should have stayed. He was extremely disappointed in himself but tried to justify his action and eventually found his way back to his regiment and in the following battles fought bravely and eventually died in battle to gain his Red Badge of Courage and was at last a man.

My moms' book club was unimpressed and spent only about 15 min. on the whole thing( I unfortuantely had to miss it this month). Moms don't like war. Henry Fleming should have listened to his mother and stayed home where it was safe. War is stupid. I suppose there are times when we have to defend ourselves, but the Civil War was just a great slaughterhouse. No other country fought a war to defeat slavery, they just slowly outlawed it as Great Britain did. What a shame we could not do the same. There are better ways of dealing with things, but I guess that if you can't work it out, then you have to kill each other and hopefully the good guys win.

We were going to read War and Peace next, but decided we have had enough of war stuff so we will be reading Portrait of a Lady and Wuthering Heights next and then we'll start War and Peace.