messylichwholivesfordrama 's review for:

American War by Omar El Akkad

2.0

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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.