A review by bookreviewswithkb
What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra Al-Maqtari

challenging dark emotional sad

5.0

“they went out laughing, full of love, and came back as corpses on stretchers.”

this is the most emotionally difficult book i have ever read - it is jarring and gruesome and haunting. Yemeni journalist, Bushra al-Maqtari, documents the accounts of the suffering of Yemeni civilians during and after the Yemeni civil war, leaving no detail out. she writes these stories in a way that brings the pain felt by the people she interviewed to the page. as much as i couldn’t put it down i could also hardly stomach it. al-Maqtari offers the gift of creating space for the voices of victims to be heard, for there to be an account of the absolute horrendous terror inflicted upon innocent civilians 

i highly recommend reading this. i think it’s especially harrowing as Palestinians are currently enduring genocide, living the same reality in the present moment as is documented here  

“i’m never sure if the sun will rise tomorrow or if a shell will kill us instead.”