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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
In 2074, the Second American Civil War breaks out. Many coastal areas of the USA, and around the world, have been claimed by rising sea levels, a group of southern states secede from the Union over the outlawing of fossil fuels and war is declared. Sarat Chesnutt is six years old when the war starts and the book is her story, as told, many years later, by her nephew.
Written by Egyptian-born Canadian journalist, Omar el Akkad, the novel can be read as an allegory on the war on terror. Sarat, born in Louisiana of mixed race parents, is displaced by the war and spends her childhood and early teens in a refugee camp where she is gradually radicalised by a charismatic leader of the ‘Red’ southern states and used in the fight against the ‘Blue’ union majority.
By depicting climate change as the pivotal, and perhaps only, factor leading to the war, the author can possibly be accused of over-simplification - it would appear that racism, for instance, has been eliminated; there is certainly no overtly racist language or characters in the novel and religious differences too have little impact on the plot - but many of his scenes are harrowing and thought provoking.
“At first he’d asked her if she preferred to make herself a weapon, to become what the Northerners called homicide bombers.”
It is shocking when the ‘heroine’ of the novel, who has at least some Katniss Everdeen-like characteristics, is offered this choice. This is near-future America, and Americans are suicide bombers… The point is reinforced by the reverence in which the south holds Julia Templestowe, a southern martyr who wore a ‘farmer’s suit’ and blew herself up assassinating the American president. The narrator also tells us at the start of the story that, following the end of formal hostilities, on Reunification Day, “one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death” - the plague kills almost ten times the eleven million who died in the war.
Nor does the south hold a monopoly on atrocities. At the beginning of the book we are told that Carolina has essentially become a wasteland due to a chemical or germ attack by the Blue states and is “a walled hospice” - the reference to the wall is not coincidental. The North has at some point lost control of their ‘warring Birds’, drones which then randomly rain down death. The North still practices waterboarding on detainees in a Guantanamo-like interrogation centre. There is an attack on a camp in which innocents are targeted in the most brutal way in a search for ‘insurgents’.
El Akkad may have ‘simplified’ but doing so allows him to focus on key issues that should be shocking. I am not an American but it seems to me that, given the turn that western society, and US society in particular, has taken recently, perhaps the events of the novel are not as shocking as they should be; this future is not as far off as it should be. The book has flaws but the story and the issues it raises will stay with me for some time.
Written by Egyptian-born Canadian journalist, Omar el Akkad, the novel can be read as an allegory on the war on terror. Sarat, born in Louisiana of mixed race parents, is displaced by the war and spends her childhood and early teens in a refugee camp where she is gradually radicalised by a charismatic leader of the ‘Red’ southern states and used in the fight against the ‘Blue’ union majority.
By depicting climate change as the pivotal, and perhaps only, factor leading to the war, the author can possibly be accused of over-simplification - it would appear that racism, for instance, has been eliminated; there is certainly no overtly racist language or characters in the novel and religious differences too have little impact on the plot - but many of his scenes are harrowing and thought provoking.
“At first he’d asked her if she preferred to make herself a weapon, to become what the Northerners called homicide bombers.”
It is shocking when the ‘heroine’ of the novel, who has at least some Katniss Everdeen-like characteristics, is offered this choice. This is near-future America, and Americans are suicide bombers… The point is reinforced by the reverence in which the south holds Julia Templestowe, a southern martyr who wore a ‘farmer’s suit’ and blew herself up assassinating the American president. The narrator also tells us at the start of the story that, following the end of formal hostilities, on Reunification Day, “one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death” - the plague kills almost ten times the eleven million who died in the war.
Nor does the south hold a monopoly on atrocities. At the beginning of the book we are told that Carolina has essentially become a wasteland due to a chemical or germ attack by the Blue states and is “a walled hospice” - the reference to the wall is not coincidental. The North has at some point lost control of their ‘warring Birds’, drones which then randomly rain down death. The North still practices waterboarding on detainees in a Guantanamo-like interrogation centre. There is an attack on a camp in which innocents are targeted in the most brutal way in a search for ‘insurgents’.
El Akkad may have ‘simplified’ but doing so allows him to focus on key issues that should be shocking. I am not an American but it seems to me that, given the turn that western society, and US society in particular, has taken recently, perhaps the events of the novel are not as shocking as they should be; this future is not as far off as it should be. The book has flaws but the story and the issues it raises will stay with me for some time.
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Very good! Only thing that bothered me was that it's set in a post-environmental catastrophe world with serious climate change, yet there's no reduce/reuse/recycle mentality. One kid breaks their arm and is worried because when something breaks you throw it out. Aside from that minor quibble, I really enjoyed this. Well written and an excellent story.
Interior premise and well written but I just wasn’t able to connect well with the book for some reason.
adventurous
challenging
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
I have read a lot of post-apocalyptic books, and I didn’t feel like there was anything new or exciting about this book. Given the cultural experiences of the author, I think it was a miss to write another apocalyptic book set in the US, versus another geographic location.
I suspect my rating might be higher had I read the book instead of listening to the audiobook. I often found myself thinking about how I would have read a line differently, especially with the dialogue of the children, who the narrator made sound like idiots to me. Bummer.
Imagine a world in which the impacts of global warming and environmental change spur increasing polarization and divisive rancor even as millions flee the American coasts. Too late to stem the tide, well-intentioned sustainable economic policies directly endanger the livelihoods of those very communities most impacted by climate change. Meanwhile, the rising temperatures and seas in the Middle East drive the United States from the region even as they become the catalyst for successful democratic revolution hinted at during the Arab Spring. Facing the largest impacts of an increasingly harsh climate, the Middle East unites in a re-emergence of the Pan-Arabism of the 70s and is among the first regions to adopt sustainable technologies and move away from fossil fuels, flourishing even as the West, too slow to respond and hobbled by partisan divisions, falls into decline.
For consumers of fossil fuels in the West, this decrease in production feeds demand and creates a vicious cycle where more and more fuels are produced at home and a wider swath of the economy becomes reliant on the very industry most responsible for deepening the crisis. For a time, the US hangs on to its former glory, as oil fields boom and the economy stabilizes. Only after industrial disaster strikes does policy intervene, incentivizing the move to more sustainable tech accessible in richer parts of the country and outlawing an industrial sector upon which many come to rely in the South. Most impacted are those who feel left behind by the state's response to increasingly frequent climate disasters, and polarization and divisiveness bloom as a result.
Eventually, violence erupts, and the unity of the state is cracked by secession and civil war.
If this world bears a reverse mirror image of the world today, that is likely no accident. Wars between polarized factions driven to violence by environmental causes are common in places like Syria, which appears in the news but gives Americans no pause over their TV dinners. El Akkad flips the script, vividly imagining a world in which it is the Middle East that stands complacent and complicit amidst its prosperous cosmopolitan empire while feeding an environmental conflict that rends the United States in two. It's a blistering social commentary, and all too vividly imagined in light of 2017's headlines.
Yet all of this serves as (largely omitted) exposition for this novel, which tells the story of the Chestnuts, a poor working class family on the hinterland of the secessionist South and who, despite having no initial loyalties in the emerging Second Civil War, are irrevocably impacted by its wanton violence. The story focuses primarily on the coming of age of young Sarat, a curious and tomboyish young girl whose traumatic experiences and frustrations of living in the filth of a refugee camp are cultivated to make her a hardened mercenary of the south.
This is the story of radicalization in the face of senseless violence, the manipulation of grief for cynical political aims, and the danger of losing empathy for those with whom we disagree. In essence, this is the story of a path towards terrorism, with not so subtle nods to the choices individuals make to pay the ultimate price to exact revenge on a group for the crimes of the past. It is the story of our future, if we do not heed the warnings of our planet and our own history.
For consumers of fossil fuels in the West, this decrease in production feeds demand and creates a vicious cycle where more and more fuels are produced at home and a wider swath of the economy becomes reliant on the very industry most responsible for deepening the crisis. For a time, the US hangs on to its former glory, as oil fields boom and the economy stabilizes. Only after industrial disaster strikes does policy intervene, incentivizing the move to more sustainable tech accessible in richer parts of the country and outlawing an industrial sector upon which many come to rely in the South. Most impacted are those who feel left behind by the state's response to increasingly frequent climate disasters, and polarization and divisiveness bloom as a result.
Eventually, violence erupts, and the unity of the state is cracked by secession and civil war.
If this world bears a reverse mirror image of the world today, that is likely no accident. Wars between polarized factions driven to violence by environmental causes are common in places like Syria, which appears in the news but gives Americans no pause over their TV dinners. El Akkad flips the script, vividly imagining a world in which it is the Middle East that stands complacent and complicit amidst its prosperous cosmopolitan empire while feeding an environmental conflict that rends the United States in two. It's a blistering social commentary, and all too vividly imagined in light of 2017's headlines.
Yet all of this serves as (largely omitted) exposition for this novel, which tells the story of the Chestnuts, a poor working class family on the hinterland of the secessionist South and who, despite having no initial loyalties in the emerging Second Civil War, are irrevocably impacted by its wanton violence. The story focuses primarily on the coming of age of young Sarat, a curious and tomboyish young girl whose traumatic experiences and frustrations of living in the filth of a refugee camp are cultivated to make her a hardened mercenary of the south.
This is the story of radicalization in the face of senseless violence, the manipulation of grief for cynical political aims, and the danger of losing empathy for those with whom we disagree. In essence, this is the story of a path towards terrorism, with not so subtle nods to the choices individuals make to pay the ultimate price to exact revenge on a group for the crimes of the past. It is the story of our future, if we do not heed the warnings of our planet and our own history.