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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
I couldn't put this book down in the last third. I have so many feelings: joy, anger, frustration and happiness all into one. At times, Sarat felt like a strong and wonderful character and at times a martyr and I hated her for it. I love how imperfect she is yet I understand those imperfections. You clearly see how she goes from a sweet, vulnerable kid to a broken and sad human.
Maybe 2.5 stars. I bought this book ahead of the 2018 Canada Reads because it sounded interesting. I think the concept was better than the execution. It took a few tries to get past the first two parts and I put it down and started over again a few times before starting over in April 2020. I took a long break between spring 2020 and December 2020. I would have wanted more discussion of the politics and causes of the civil war. I'm not sure the primary documents approach was as effective. I liked the latter half of the book better, particularly after Camp Patience and the allegory of Guantanamo.
adventurous
dark
emotional
The concept is more interesting than the execution at points, though I had to remind myself that made sense when considering the obvious research and planning that had gone into the novel. The last two chapters made me enjoy the ride, however, and the issues of war, forgiveness, pride, and revenge all come to head in an ending more bitter than sweet.
As another reviewer put it - this book is not about what you think it is. I went in expecting more of a dystopian worldview, or more groundwork for how we got to the North-South point of conflict. Instead, it's about indoctrination, and one example of what it might take to radicalize someone. I do think that the author painted this picture effectively... but it just wasn't for me. This book is also so, so dark. I wasn't a huge fan of the protagonist, her decision-marking and narrow, stubborn worldview, although I did understand how she got to where she was.
An elderly man with terminal cancer tells the story of his aunt, Sarat Chestnut, and her involvement in the Second American Civil War (2074 – 2095). We see how she, a young girl with a relatively happy childhood, is radicalized and becomes a terrorist fighting Northerners after her family ends up in a camp for Southern refugees. Interspersed with her narrative are primary sources (academic studies, government reports, military documents) that flesh out the background.
By the time the war begins, the United States has experienced an environmental catastrophe. Because of global warming, the oceans have risen dramatically and forced people to move inland. A man-made plague has quarantined South Carolina. The civil war erupts because the government has passed a Sustainable Futures Act which prohibits the extraction and use of fossil fuels. Longstanding political divisions worsen, and Southerners in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia rebel against this law and secede. The fighting, with each side making incursions, makes refugees of even more people. On Reunification Day, a day to mark the end of the war, a biological agent is released which results in a plague that takes over 100 million lives.
These events are the background because the novel focuses on Sarat: “This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.” She is an intelligent and independent child, but family tragedies, violent reprisals, and even the boredom of the camp make her ripe for recruitment. Provided with training and weapons, she is changed into a terrorist: “For Sarat Chestnut, the calculus was simple: the enemy had violated her people, and for that she would violate the enemy. There could be no other way, she knew it. Blood can never be unspilled.” Her anger is emphasized again and again: “Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.” By the end, though the reader will not condone her activities, he/she will certainly understand how she became an angry young woman full of hatred and capable of violence.
The book asks readers to put themselves in the position of displaced persons: “the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same – and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.”
The book is not flawless. The premise for the civil war is weak: would a war break out because of a dispute over the use of fossil fuels? (Though there is a nod to a contemporary nation divided by ideology: the word Red is shorthand for the South, a term that has “something to do with who voted for the old Republican Party back when it was all still one country.”) The science is questionable: would all of Florida be inundated by rising ocean levels? Would drones go rogue because a server farm is destroyed? There are coincidences that do not ring true: Sarat’s repeated meetings with a friend are very improbable. There are the things that don’t change: one hundred years in the future, people will still watch television? And there are things that aren’t mentioned: in fifty years, race issues have been resolved?
To increase the book’s plausibility, the author makes reference to issues which have parallels in our world. The U.S. is currently involved in foreign conflicts; in the novel, foreign powers become involved in the American civil war because of their own agendas. A representative of a pan-Arab empire, which has emerged and wants to become the new superpower, admits that Americans cannot be allowed to kill themselves in peace: “’we intend . . . to be the most powerful empire in the world. For that to happen, other empires must fail. . . . Everyone fights an American war.’” Refugees are often unwelcome in parts of our world; in the next century of the novel, refugees are often disliked. One man who was a refugee years earlier protests the arrival of newer refugees: “Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence in a city already overwhelmed. At the foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be a pestilence field. We carried signs calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would take them in. It made me feel good to do it, it made me feel rooted: their unbelonging was proof of my belonging.” (I love the twist to the refugee crisis: “’If you ever stand anywhere on this shore, say in New Algiers, you’ll see fleets of ragged little boats headed southward from the European shore . . . Boats full of migrants from the old Union countries, looking for better lives.’”) Certainly, the climate change deniers of today are like the people in the novel who refuse to give up their vehicles powered by the remains of “ancient lizards.” There are power struggles among various rebel groups, the types of struggles that can be found in the Middle East today. There is even passing reference to antibiotic drug resistance: “’there used to be drugs that could have fixed her right up, but everybody used them too much and they didn’t work anymore.’”
Though not without its faults, this book is worth reading. It is thought-provoking, providing a new perspective on refugees, and emphasizes the need to take care of these people. If we do nothing, we had best hope that “even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.” The book will leave you thinking, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
By the time the war begins, the United States has experienced an environmental catastrophe. Because of global warming, the oceans have risen dramatically and forced people to move inland. A man-made plague has quarantined South Carolina. The civil war erupts because the government has passed a Sustainable Futures Act which prohibits the extraction and use of fossil fuels. Longstanding political divisions worsen, and Southerners in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia rebel against this law and secede. The fighting, with each side making incursions, makes refugees of even more people. On Reunification Day, a day to mark the end of the war, a biological agent is released which results in a plague that takes over 100 million lives.
These events are the background because the novel focuses on Sarat: “This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.” She is an intelligent and independent child, but family tragedies, violent reprisals, and even the boredom of the camp make her ripe for recruitment. Provided with training and weapons, she is changed into a terrorist: “For Sarat Chestnut, the calculus was simple: the enemy had violated her people, and for that she would violate the enemy. There could be no other way, she knew it. Blood can never be unspilled.” Her anger is emphasized again and again: “Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.” By the end, though the reader will not condone her activities, he/she will certainly understand how she became an angry young woman full of hatred and capable of violence.
The book asks readers to put themselves in the position of displaced persons: “the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same – and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.”
The book is not flawless. The premise for the civil war is weak: would a war break out because of a dispute over the use of fossil fuels? (Though there is a nod to a contemporary nation divided by ideology: the word Red is shorthand for the South, a term that has “something to do with who voted for the old Republican Party back when it was all still one country.”) The science is questionable: would all of Florida be inundated by rising ocean levels? Would drones go rogue because a server farm is destroyed? There are coincidences that do not ring true: Sarat’s repeated meetings with a friend are very improbable. There are the things that don’t change: one hundred years in the future, people will still watch television? And there are things that aren’t mentioned: in fifty years, race issues have been resolved?
To increase the book’s plausibility, the author makes reference to issues which have parallels in our world. The U.S. is currently involved in foreign conflicts; in the novel, foreign powers become involved in the American civil war because of their own agendas. A representative of a pan-Arab empire, which has emerged and wants to become the new superpower, admits that Americans cannot be allowed to kill themselves in peace: “’we intend . . . to be the most powerful empire in the world. For that to happen, other empires must fail. . . . Everyone fights an American war.’” Refugees are often unwelcome in parts of our world; in the next century of the novel, refugees are often disliked. One man who was a refugee years earlier protests the arrival of newer refugees: “Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence in a city already overwhelmed. At the foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be a pestilence field. We carried signs calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would take them in. It made me feel good to do it, it made me feel rooted: their unbelonging was proof of my belonging.” (I love the twist to the refugee crisis: “’If you ever stand anywhere on this shore, say in New Algiers, you’ll see fleets of ragged little boats headed southward from the European shore . . . Boats full of migrants from the old Union countries, looking for better lives.’”) Certainly, the climate change deniers of today are like the people in the novel who refuse to give up their vehicles powered by the remains of “ancient lizards.” There are power struggles among various rebel groups, the types of struggles that can be found in the Middle East today. There is even passing reference to antibiotic drug resistance: “’there used to be drugs that could have fixed her right up, but everybody used them too much and they didn’t work anymore.’”
Though not without its faults, this book is worth reading. It is thought-provoking, providing a new perspective on refugees, and emphasizes the need to take care of these people. If we do nothing, we had best hope that “even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.” The book will leave you thinking, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
I chose to read this book after listening to the “Extremist Future” episode of NPR’s Throughline podcast (link below). In this episode we are “immersed in Omar El Akkad's 'what could be' to understand larger questions about history, humanity, and American exceptionalism”. Though I would not have known of the book’s existence without listening to this episode, I wish I had learned about the book some other way, read the book first and then listened to the episode. Because of the podcast, I already had some idea of who the main character is, and what her choices would be. Still, I really enjoyed this story.
Basic concept: in the not so distant future a second civil war breaks out in the United States. Climate change has ravaged the country. Several factions of fighters occupy the south. Suicide bombers and biological warfare is happening. Southerners from the coasts and the war torn borders flee to refugee camps. The story follows Sarat Chestnut from her childhood in Louisiana through her life as a fighter, and beyond.
It’s easy to empathize with the Sarat even as her environment shapes her into who she becomes. I won’t go more in-depth than that so as not to spoil it for anyone else, but for sure, if you want to read this book, listen to the podcast after rather than before.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148854407/extremist-futures
Basic concept: in the not so distant future a second civil war breaks out in the United States. Climate change has ravaged the country. Several factions of fighters occupy the south. Suicide bombers and biological warfare is happening. Southerners from the coasts and the war torn borders flee to refugee camps. The story follows Sarat Chestnut from her childhood in Louisiana through her life as a fighter, and beyond.
It’s easy to empathize with the Sarat even as her environment shapes her into who she becomes. I won’t go more in-depth than that so as not to spoil it for anyone else, but for sure, if you want to read this book, listen to the podcast after rather than before.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148854407/extremist-futures
A novel speculating on the dangers of political partisanship and unchecked climate change. American War is both a cautionary tale and an allegory of present-day military occupation.
In 2074, Sara T "Sarat" Chestnut is six-years-old. She lives in Louisiana with her family by the Mississippi sea. She's happy there. Despite her parents' plans to move the family to the North, the breakout of the Second American Civil War sends Sarat, her siblings, and her mother to a Southern refugee camp. In Camp Patience, Sarat befriends a powerful, mysterious man with ties to the new global superpower — the North African and Arab Bouazizi Empire. Under her mentor's tutelage, Sarat is radicalized into a deadly instrument of war.
The novel is best read as an allegory of present-day military conflict. Author Omar El Akkad expands on the horrors and absurdities of modern warfare such as drone strikes, predatory indoctrination, suicide bombers, and ineffective humanitarian aid. His inclusion of contrived primary sources draws additional parallels to military occupation occuring today. These sources also add depth to the conflict, making it feel factual. However, American War falls short as a speculative novel. By avoiding race, class, gender, and their intersections in the conflict, El Akkad fails to fully bring the war to American soil.
A captivating dystopian novel that's rooted in reality, American War tells the story of a family struggling to survive during a country's collapse. If at times the writing leaned towards melodramatic, El Akkad more than made up for it in his masterfully crafted characters and cannily detailed plot. A disquieting read.
In 2074, Sara T "Sarat" Chestnut is six-years-old. She lives in Louisiana with her family by the Mississippi sea. She's happy there. Despite her parents' plans to move the family to the North, the breakout of the Second American Civil War sends Sarat, her siblings, and her mother to a Southern refugee camp. In Camp Patience, Sarat befriends a powerful, mysterious man with ties to the new global superpower — the North African and Arab Bouazizi Empire. Under her mentor's tutelage, Sarat is radicalized into a deadly instrument of war.
The novel is best read as an allegory of present-day military conflict. Author Omar El Akkad expands on the horrors and absurdities of modern warfare such as drone strikes, predatory indoctrination, suicide bombers, and ineffective humanitarian aid. His inclusion of contrived primary sources draws additional parallels to military occupation occuring today. These sources also add depth to the conflict, making it feel factual. However, American War falls short as a speculative novel. By avoiding race, class, gender, and their intersections in the conflict, El Akkad fails to fully bring the war to American soil.
A captivating dystopian novel that's rooted in reality, American War tells the story of a family struggling to survive during a country's collapse. If at times the writing leaned towards melodramatic, El Akkad more than made up for it in his masterfully crafted characters and cannily detailed plot. A disquieting read.
3.5 stars. While I appreciate the focus of Sarat’s journey through the war, I was left feeling like a huge chunk of the story was missing. In all four parts of the book, I wanted more backstory on the war itself and future America.
This was alright but ultimately pretty disappointing. The ecological aspects of the imagined future were upsettingly plausible, but the cultural divide in America that El Akkad envisioned was shallow, as if it was only based on stereotypes but not really consistently or comprehensively. Sarat was a deeply unpleasant person to spend so much time with as well. I know she's not really supposed to be sympathetic, but I didn't really find her to be much of a character at all.
Edit: I'm now reading Omar El Akkad's memoir/polemic One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and getting some insight into why this book was so ineffective for me. It's a "what if it happened here" story that tries to depict the civil wars and humanitarian nightmares that Americans watch and our government funds abroad if they happened here in the US. Unfortunately, El Akkad didn't spend much time trying to build a story on that premise that is in any way rooted in American history, so for me it fell completely flat. How would a civil war on North/South lines be so divorced from the previous Civil War and the uncompleted reconstruction that followed it? Why is race entirely absent as a social force? Rooting this story in that essential American conflict would make it impossible to sympathize with the side the book spends all of its time with (which I already found pretty difficult tbh), but not situating it in real American history made the whole thing feel like cardboard scenery. It just isn't believable, so the whole exercise fails.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is a much better novel with a similar premise.
Edit: I'm now reading Omar El Akkad's memoir/polemic One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and getting some insight into why this book was so ineffective for me. It's a "what if it happened here" story that tries to depict the civil wars and humanitarian nightmares that Americans watch and our government funds abroad if they happened here in the US. Unfortunately, El Akkad didn't spend much time trying to build a story on that premise that is in any way rooted in American history, so for me it fell completely flat. How would a civil war on North/South lines be so divorced from the previous Civil War and the uncompleted reconstruction that followed it? Why is race entirely absent as a social force? Rooting this story in that essential American conflict would make it impossible to sympathize with the side the book spends all of its time with (which I already found pretty difficult tbh), but not situating it in real American history made the whole thing feel like cardboard scenery. It just isn't believable, so the whole exercise fails.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is a much better novel with a similar premise.