The Yellow Birds: A Novel

"The Yellow Birds" might just be the first American literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war, even if an imperfect one. It is, without a doubt, a powerful and disturbing statement about the brutality of that conflict, and of the deep wounds inflicted on thousands of our citizen-soldiers.

Powell is a gifted writer, but more poet than novelist. The Yellow Birds, which should be better than it is, relies far too much on that lyricism and on metaphor for its resonance, and reads in many ways like a prose poem.

Powers hasn’t written a classic war novel yet, but there are enough victories in these pages to suggest he’s marching in the right direction.

“The Yellow Birds” is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined story about a soldier’s coming of age, a harrowing tale about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory.