Grenade By Alan Gratz

Grenade is a book that was published in 2018 by Alan Gratz, is about the war in the Pacific, specifically the bloody battle of Okinawa. This book follows two boys named Ray and Hideki.
Hideki is a boy on Okinawa island, and he goes to school at an unnamed university. When the war with America starts the whole school is drafted into the army, because after all this is the Okinawan island, so it’s their fight. Anyways, Hideki and all the other boys are given two grenades each, with instructions to use one grenade to kill as many Americans as possible, and the other to kill themselves. This frightens Hideki especially because he believes that he has one of his ancestor's mabui on him (a sort of spiritual thing that gives you the character traits of the other person.) His ancestor was a coward, so he thinks that that is what he is going to be and that he is screwed into being a scaredy cat. As the book goes along Hideki realizes what the Japanese are planning, and finds out that it isn’t just the Americans that are monsters, it’s everyone. So he ditches the Japanese army in search of safety, but he keeps the grenades. In his search to find safety, he stumbles upon his family tomb where he finds his dad, Oto. Oto

These are all things incorporated with war, and may not be the things that people think about right away when they go into the army. The book shows and describes what the war is really like from both sides. It shows the fear that people feel in a battle, and how the things that happen to them will be terrifying. Grenade also shows how the normal people who go into the war, whether drafted or signed up, turn into monsters in a way. The constant fear of death, capture, or ambush is enough to scare anyone. Not to mention having to kill people, actual people with families, and lives outside of the war. People who before the war were just normal people, but changed. Turned into monsters by the hardships of