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strangementalitypaper 's review for:
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah
I read this for school, so I will make a video going in depth with my review for the assignment. I will say here that this really didn't read like creative nonfiction at all and books like this that lack scene and a strong voice are the reason many readers avoid nonfiction. This was published years before the big CNF boom, so there's that. I did read that the validity of this memoir has been brought into question, and I also find myself wondering as to its truthfulness. I want to give Beah some slack due to his childhood trauma, but if you look at the straight-up facts, the timeline doesn't add up at all and it leads me to wonder...
Without taking the question of its validity into account, the book stands at a solid 3 stars. I definitely recommend it for memoir lovers, but for someone who is a hardcore fiction and CNF reader... I'd say it would be a pass.
I also will say that I already new a lot about the child soldiers in Africa before going into this since I was involved with Invisible Children (although that was a completely separate war), so I wasn't so shocked by the violence and atrocities committed by the rebels as someone else might be.
Without taking the question of its validity into account, the book stands at a solid 3 stars. I definitely recommend it for memoir lovers, but for someone who is a hardcore fiction and CNF reader... I'd say it would be a pass.
I also will say that I already new a lot about the child soldiers in Africa before going into this since I was involved with Invisible Children (although that was a completely separate war), so I wasn't so shocked by the violence and atrocities committed by the rebels as someone else might be.