Review Detail

The Vietnam Conflict ended nearly forty years ago, yet it still touches our lives. Everybody Sees the Ants depicts how lives are still affected by what happened.

This is a not an easy book to describe because it juggles three themes: bullying, life in a dysfunctional family, and an aftereffect of the Vietnam War. Lucky Linderman is a high school freshman who has learned to cope with serial bullying and seriously odd and deficient parents in a strange way—by escaping into the world of his grandfather, a soldier missing in action (MIA) in Laos during the war. The escape is a surreal dream world Lucky regularly visits. He is always on the same mission: to rescue his grandfather from a jungle prison camp. The situation is always different, jungle-gritty, and enlightening in some way for Lucky, who in his dream world has the strength and skills he doesn’t possess in the real world. Through his repeated visits Lucky gets to know this dream version of his grandfather rather well. As he does, the reader gradually comes to learn more and more about Lucky’s less-than-ideal life and how he came to be the way he is.