After the first two Harry Potters, Chris Columbus was poised to be the biggest hotshot director around, but Rent, I Love You beth Cooper and Percy Jackson rather ruined that. Indeed his biggest recent success was producing The Help.

He seems to have learned from that, as he’s now taking another bestselling book that touches on real-life themes and turning it into movie. Deadline reports he’s set to direct Home Front, based on Kristin Hannah’s book. While nearly all military stories are about men, this one’s about a woman who juggles being a wife and mother with a job as a National Guard Blackhawk helicopter pilot. She’s then called up to Iraq, which inevitably causes all sorts of issues to arise.

Columbus says, “I was blown away by this book, I simply could not put it down. It told the story about the cost of war from a completely unique perspective: what happens when a wife and mother is called into action and how her family adjusts to life without her, and to a changed life upon her return. Home Front not only portrays the great sacrifices our military makes for us, but depicts so powerfully the hidden sacrifices their families make as well.”