War is hell. Grant completes his exceptionally well-researched WWII trilogy, continuing the stories of three women soldiers: Rio Richlin, Rainy Schulterman, and Frangie Marr during the deadliest year of the war. Starting with the landing in Normandy on Omaha Beach, Grant takes us through many of the seminal war events of 1944-1945 in Europe, such as the massacres at Malmédy and Oradour-sur-Glane , the pointless, ill-considered American campaign in Hürtgen Forest, and the liberation of Jews from Nazi concentration camps. Somehow, these three courageous women led by example. The post-war stories were a great way to end the series. ( )

This has been on my TBR since it came out and I finally got around to reading it. It took me forever to build up the courage, because I'd really grown to care about these characters and the series is set during WWII, so I just knew one of them was going to die and I just knew it was going to be Frangie. Thankfully, Frangie did not end up a fatality. Plenty of others did, some of whom readers had known since Front Lines and some of whom were introduced in this volume.

Because this is a WWII-set series and because these young women (and men) are serving on the front lines of that war, there is a lot of description of battle and wounds and other horrors of war and I get why that is necessary. But, to me, the section of the book devoted to the D Day landing at Omaha Beach went on too long, especially when compared to the brevity of the section on the liberation of the camps. I am not saying that the section on the camps needed to be longer, but if the horrors of what happened there could be conveyed in a relatively few pages, perhaps the horror and madness of D Day could have been, as well.

That, though, is my only real complaint. Otherwise, I found this to be a very satisfying conclusion to the series. ( )