I am fearing because I am seeing that the only way not to be fighting is to die. I am not wanting to die.

This is small book told by a small person and involving a small world. There’s a kind of claustrophobic feel and tone to this novel and that is both terrifying and horrifying, but it’s awful oddly reassuring both for us as readers and for the narrator.

I bought this novel when it first came out, and skipped the movie because I never ended up reading it. Now, the author has a new book that’s been recently published and well I figured I would want to read that and so I finally got around to reading this. And it’s very good.

The story is a young boy (around 12) lives in a country in wartime, where there’s clearly a kind of revolution between warring factions happening. We know that there are multiple sides to this conflict because of the different uniforms. When one such faction comes to his village, he is conscripted into their army because he otherwise believes (and he is likely correct) that to refuse is to be killed. He does not want to be killed and he wants to go out into the world and make something of himself (to be a doctor for example), and so he goes along with what he is told to do. And he is told and made to kill, he is told and made to commit other atrocities.

The novel is not a scary as the movie seems to make it, maybe because I feel so clearly removed from the experiences, and that seems to be one of the strengths of the novel. To make the normal aspects of growing up at a certain time in one’s life and place that vulnerability and fragility and black/white understanding of the world into the truly horribleness of war.

(Photo: http://www.harpercollinsspeakersbureau.com/speaker/uzodinma-iweala/)