Gallagher’s voice is vital, literary and sometimes lyrical ... In Youngblood, [he] shows again how war works in the human heart — something we’ll need to know, as long as there is war.
Mr. Gallagher has a keen reportorial eye, a distinctive voice and an instinctive sympathy for the people he is writing about, and he uses those gifts here to immerse us in his characters' lives ... an urgent and deeply moving novel.
Youngblood is a gritty, tragic, realistic look inside the failures of America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq told by someone who lived it as a young infantry lieutenant ... Through his broader story, that murder mystery and its eventual resolution, Gallagher deftly offers an allegorical view of the whole war.
