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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
A devastating, painful story that sticks in your mind like honey. This tale will captivate you and despite the dark scenes you can feel the sense of life that is within every word.
The year is 2075. Global warming has caused sea levels to rise and overtake coastal cities, resulting in a great migration to the Midwest and the capitol relocating to Columbus. A federal ban on fossil fuels drives the South to secede and America is once again embroiled in Civil War.
This is the world Sarat Chestnut grows up in and over time, it molds her into a weapon, an insurrectionist, a terrorist.
I read this during a week in which a white supremacist rally protesting the removal of a statue of a Civil War general turned deadly. The old wounds of that war remain and the Southern cause seems to still to burn for many in this country.
Much like "The Handmaid's Tale" felt all too eerily possible in our current society, "American War" too feels like a harbinger of things to come.
This passage really struck me:
"...if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over.
But in the end Columbus went along with it, and even today, all these years later, we live with the consequences. They didn't understand, they just didn't understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories."
What stories are we telling ourselves about our bloody past?
This is the world Sarat Chestnut grows up in and over time, it molds her into a weapon, an insurrectionist, a terrorist.
I read this during a week in which a white supremacist rally protesting the removal of a statue of a Civil War general turned deadly. The old wounds of that war remain and the Southern cause seems to still to burn for many in this country.
Much like "The Handmaid's Tale" felt all too eerily possible in our current society, "American War" too feels like a harbinger of things to come.
This passage really struck me:
"...if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over.
But in the end Columbus went along with it, and even today, all these years later, we live with the consequences. They didn't understand, they just didn't understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories."
What stories are we telling ourselves about our bloody past?
dark
reflective
sad
medium-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
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Great speculative fiction always feels like it really could have happened in another reality. Reading this in today's climate feels somewhat like reading Station Eleven during the pandemic.
Prose and pacing were both pretty great. The characters and plot all felt real and fully conceptualized. I wouldn't file this under sci-fi, unless the sciences in question were political science and sociology. Reads more like alternate history, which was probably why I liked it so much.
That said, this is a tough read about war and living through it. A lot of violence, but also life shimmering through the cracks.
Prose and pacing were both pretty great. The characters and plot all felt real and fully conceptualized. I wouldn't file this under sci-fi, unless the sciences in question were political science and sociology. Reads more like alternate history, which was probably why I liked it so much.
That said, this is a tough read about war and living through it. A lot of violence, but also life shimmering through the cracks.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Torture, Violence, War
Moderate: Medical trauma, Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Suicide
challenging
reflective
sad
tense
medium-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:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, War
Minor: Confinement, Self harm, Murder, Pandemic/Epidemic
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Don't bother - there's way better dystopian novels out there, there's way better nonfiction writings about politics & war. The dialogue is clunky, the character's motivations are either overly broad or opaque and only the action pieces move things forward. By the time it runs completely out of steam, it's pretty much too late to give up on it.
Overhyped.
Overhyped.
I wanted to like this because I liked the premise, as grim as it is. But bad dialogue and hackneyed cliches of the South (up to and including flashes of Ken Burns's Civil War series) made this really rough going. It's thematically grounded in current ideological debates, but projected 50 years into the future, where not much appears to have changed. Perhaps with more empathetic characters I might have been pulled in, but the dialogue is so predictable and wooden that it just failed me. The dystopian novel needs a facelift, but not like this.
challenging
dark
informative
tense
medium-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:
Yes
A book that takes real events from the Arab world and places them in an American future
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Death, Torture, Violence, Mass/school shootings, Death of parent, Murder, Alcohol, War
Minor: Rape