Today @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Chris Crowe's Death Coming Up the Hill, which threw me for way more of an emotional loop than I expected it to:

Sixteen thousand, five hundred and ninety-two American soldiers died in Vietnam in 1968. Chris Crowe’s Death Coming Up the Hill is a homefront story about that year, told in haiku form: 976 of them to be exact, equaling 16,592 syllables. Put like that, it sounds gimmicky—but it doesn’t read like that at all.

War story, family story, coming of age, and making hard choices in the face of other hard choices... woof. It's a good one.