A review by bookwoods
The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria by Janine di Giovanni

4.0

The Morning They Came for Us is one the hardest books I´ve ever read. It doesn´t shy away from brutality - rape, torture, death, unimaginable grief and pain. It feels horrible to think how ignorant I was of this war blazing in The Middle East, how easy it is to close one´s eyes. I find it really important that I read di Giovanni´s book despite my hesitation. She writes extremely well, the stories and the pain of the people of Syria come across strongly and real through the text. The biggest criticism I have regards the structure of the book. For someone with very poor base knowledge of the crisis in Syria it is confusing. The chapters jump in time, in settings and in themes and they don´t offer much in the way of general knowledge of what was happening. (It didn´t help that I found the timeline from the back of the book only after I had finished reading it.) I think something like `a short introduction to the situation in the Middle East´ at the start would have been really helpful. The ones who already know a lot could have skipped it. In any case, I do still think The Morning They Came for Us is a brilliant book. It tells about the war from the people´s perspective, not as a dry timeline of different fights, bombings and victories. I just wish di Giovanni had planned it better for people quite unfamiliar with the subject.