Cover Image: American War

American War

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Heavily politically motivated dystopian novel that has a lot of promise and action and thriller moments but also some pretty insipid characters. I like my dystopian novels to be more character driven, I guess, because in a wasteland, what's left to be interesting besides the people? But it's a great sci-fi imagining of and upcoming dystopic state and will spark a lot of interest and conversation amongst readers.

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Some parts of this book are beautiful -the writing, the characters, it all fits so perfectly together thats its nothing but beautiful.
But other parts of this book feel very unfinished, raw and ruff around the edges, leaving me confused and unsure about what happened, why or how the book got to this point.

I really liked the idea of this book -basically speculative futuristic fiction about how America could end up in the near future.

But i do think that the author could have done a better job in actually explaining what happened to get to this future he writes about as if the reader just knows what happened and how it all came to be.
How the "new" world worked, how it came to be, why things are happening as they are done... it all is left unexplained (at least to me it is not explained enough, since its basically just explained as: war happened, this is the consequence of it!) and for me that is not enough.

Now i don't need five chapters detailing me exactly how change happened or how it all came to be -i don't need a history lesson. BUT i do need to understand why people react as they do, especially if it influences a lot of why the characters are as they are.

But the idea is still good, and if the author would have put a little bit more work into developing the actual futuristic world, given a little bit more thought into understanding that the reader is NOT inside his head and did not follow along with his development and ideas before he wrote the actual book, i am sure it would have been a fantastic book.

Sadly since that did not happen, so this book is "only" a good book.


If you love different world views, enjoy getting one perspective of where our future might be heading and generally enjoy a good book idea -even if the actual book itself could have been done better- and different characters and easy to read writing, defiantly give this book a try.

If you are someone that needs actual good plot, that makes sense from start to finish, need character development that you can follow along, see happening and understand, want consistency in the writing and how the story is told... i don't think that this book will give you what you are looking for.

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I received a review copy of this book so feel obliged to review it. I did not finish it. I kept being reminded of "The Country of Ice Cream Star" by Sandra Newman without its creative and playful language. I think "American War" will find many readers, but I just couldn't get through it.

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I actually could not finish this book. I really enjoyed it but it was beginning to scare me. The idea that one day they world may end up like this again was scaring me and I had to put the book down.

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This is the scond best book I've read this year (Exit, West is first).

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It's 2075. America is beset by flooding linked to climate change and the coastal states have lost significant if not all of their landmass. Washington D.C. was devastated by flooding and the northern capital is now in Columbus, Ohio. World wide temperatures have soared and the continental US experiences unbearable heat. Coastal states have water supplies polluted with salt water and irrigation and agriculture has disappeared.

The US Congress passed a bill prohibiting the use of fossil fuels "in response to decades of adverse climate effects, the waning economic importance of fossil fuels". The southern states rebelled to protect the waning coal mining industry and to preserve their southern traditions. The protests led to violence and the assassination of the President.

South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi seceded from the Union in 2074 and formed The Free Southern States (FSS) with it's capital in Atlanta.

Millions of displaced citizens, some from the ravages of nature and others victims of partisan militias, have been forced into refugee camps. The south, now unable to resupply from the north and western states, is reliant on foreign assistance for food and goods. A rabid civil war, using biological and conventional weapons, raged for the next 20 years.

Amid this cacophony of war, we follow the Chestnut family through the nightmare. We meet the twins, Sarat and Dana; polar opposites. Dana, beautiful and admired -ever the family princess is contrasted with Sarat, inquisitive, introverted, furious and observant- over-sized in both body and mind. Simon, the typical teenage boy, is caught up in gangs and searching for his place in this war of against humanity.

When their father attempts to take the family north for a better life, he is murdered. The children and their mother are forced into Camp Patience, a misnomer if there ever was one.

At this point the story focuses on Sarat in a story that starts out like Katniss in the Hunger Games as she stalks the edges of mental and physical confinement and ends in unimaginable horror. As we follow Sarat through the years at Camp Patience, we meet evil in the person of Albert Gaines. Gaines slowly and carefully uses Sarat's anger and fury at the cruel deaths and injuries inflicted on her family to mold her into the perfect weapon for his cause.

Sarat's radicalization should scare the bejesus out of the reader. If you think your child could resist the pressures of a crafty weasel posing as the answer to their mental confusion about the world- think again. And as Sarat carries out her final mission, the truth of how easy it would be to find this same horror in our own time will rock your world.

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I found this book a compelling read - I couldn't put it down! It was frightening because it shows how multi-generational ideological conflict is so difficult to overcome. While this is the norm in many parts of the world, being set in the U.S. makes it seem like the logical end of our current political divisions.

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Not my usual kind of book, but a very interesting look at a possible future I hope America will be able to avoid

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Akkad's novel imagines a second Civil War in the United States. The old hatreds still stew in the distant future. Now, global warming pushes the United States into a second conflict. Water has flooded the coastal cities and seeks to claim more land. Meanwhile, the Federal Government restricts all use of fossil fuels to deal with the emergency. Except the South won't comply. War ensues, but instead of a decisive war, it becomes a stalemate. New technologies developed make the damage done just as devastating as the last Civil War. It's an endless war where America's fortunes are reversed. Instead of being the empire intervening in other countries, they are brought to their knees by their own strife. A strife that is far more devastating.

Akkad easily combines warfare that is going on around the world and placing it square in the United States. One can easily make comparisons to conflicts in the Middle East, particularly with the Israel and Palestine conflict. As we sit in the United States and read about drones in the news (or in books like The Drone Eats with Me) there is nothing more terrifying than seeing this technology used in the United States. It is a startling point to be made by Akkad that war is a universal language. Without seeking peace, there is no end to the pain of war. No one wins.


NOTES FROM

American War

Omar El Akkad

May 7, 2017
Chapter Nine
And what she understood—what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood—was that 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.

May 8, 2017
Chapter Nine
She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness. What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relatives in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy.

May 8, 2017
Chapter Nine
Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.

May 8, 2017
Chapter Thirteen
Many years later, when her letter led me to the place of her buried memories and I read the pages she left behind, I learned all about the moments that filled in the blanks between those things I’d witnessed with my own eyes. And by the time I was done reading, I’d learned every last secret my aunt had to give. Some people are born sentenced to terrible inheritance, diseases that lay dormant in the blood from birth. My sentence was to know, to understand.

May 8, 2017
Chapter Fifteen
There’s this passage in one of the books Albert Gaines once gave me. It said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past—the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting. What they’ve got up there in the Blue—what your wife wants, what our parents wanted—is a future.”

May 9, 2017
Chapter Sixteen
Why?” she echoed, bemused. “Because it was the right thing to do.” She chuckled. “Sarat told me you were a sweet boy. Benjamin, but you must understand that in this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t about who wins, or who kills who. In this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t even about right and wrong. It’s about what you do for your own.”

All Excerpts From

Omar El Akkad. “American War.” Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017-04-04. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

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An absolutely amazing book. Could NOT put it down!

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Very intense book. Although horrifying, the story is plausible and portrays the worst in people.

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Louisiana, April 2075. The Second American War is raging. Sarat Chestnut is too young to fully understand what is going on, but even at her age she understands that times are hard: half of the state is underwater, food is scarce and they are not free to move. Nevertheless, her father wants to go north, where climate is less challenging and where his family can have a future. Another attack kills this dream and Sarat has to flee with her mother, her twin sister and her elder brother to a refugee camp. In Camp Patience, some kind of normal life can be established and from just a weeks of survival become years. People organise themselves according to the new circumstances, however, the chances of enduring peace are small. And, with the time, the danger of another fierce attack grows and Sarat, now a teenager, is in a different position from when her father was killed. She has to witness the worst human behaviour imaginable and this leaves a mark on her. She is not the same person anymore and she will seek revenge for what has been done to her, her family, her people.

Set at some point in the future, Omar El Akkad’s novel is nonetheless easy to imagine. The challenges due to climate change are not that fancy that you could not easily believe them. Since mankind is more prone to securing comfort than thinking ahead for future generations, having vast spaces of land destroyed will definitely be a reality sooner or later. That this – or something completely different – might lead to a civil war even in the United States, is not that inconceivable, either. We have seen many states crumble and fall in the last few years. We can only hope that the novel is much closer to fiction than to reality.

The most striking aspect is of course the protagonist Sarat. We first meet her as a young girl, naive and unaware of most of what happens around her. She is guided by her mother who already shows how powerful women of that family can be. The older she becomes, the stronger she gets. As a teenager, we have a courageous girl who is not only unafraid, but also clever and eager to understand what is going on. This not only saves her life but also makes her the woman she will be later. What she has to witness and go through, strengthens her conviction. As a grown-up woman, especially when she is in prison, we meet an unfaltering and determined woman who cannot be destroyed. Yet, she remains human, she has not completely lost faith in mankind and still can do some good – in her very own understanding.

The experience of war and human beings losing all social behaviour and sympathy for others is what determines the characters’ actions. Sarat realised that
“the misery of war represented the world’s truly universal language” (Pos. 2985) and “The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.”
This dystopian view of the world is the only lesson we can learn from watching the news. In accepting the wars around us, we produce generations who are branded by the experiences and thus ready to do harm in the same way. We should not need novels to illustrate this simple calculation.

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Well written, fascinating characters and a unique story. Loved it!

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What a story: An allegory of both the American South and the Middle East; both regions are characters in the book, recognizable and also completely spun on their respective heads. Sarat is a compelling main character, and it was fascinating to see race play such a small part in a book about an American Civil War. The future, it seems, may be both better than the bleak present would suggest and worse than we can imagine.

My full review appears as an "editor's choice," without byline, on the web site of a major bookseller.

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This book felt like a prediction of what the world could look like if America continues to be geographically so divided on politics, science, and policy. A second Civil War has come between the north and the south over issues related to energy, fossil fuels to be exact, and climate change, all while extreme climate events are happening and land is gobbled up by rising sea levels and extreme weather events. This story follows one family as they try to survive through the war in a southern refugee camp and the events that can change one girl from just a girl trying to survive, into a dangerous weapon willing to risk everything to strike back at the enemy. Well constructed and executed, this novel served up much food for thought. The author's imagined America at war with itself is so realistic that it is a bit unsettling.

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Wonderful book. I couldn't put it down! Interesting story and characters.

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I wanted to like this book. It presented a realistic scenario of the future. Unfortunately, it was too realistic and the first 5 or so chapters were unrelentingly dark. For my own sanity, I had to let it go. It was like the Shining. The Shining was done so well, it aroused so much eerie creepiness, that I have never been able to finish it.

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I liked this book and the premise was fascinating, especially in light of what is going on in the States right now, but it just didn't catch me the way I had hoped. I wish I could have fallen in love with Sarat but she was too cold, and I get why, I just didn't love the book so much because of it.

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This is what everybody else is doing at home, while everyone else is watching The Hunger Games

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Sea levels & temperatures rise & when oil is made illegal, a nation is torn apart. The second American Civil War breaks out in 2074 & we experience it along with six-year-old Sarat Chestnut, who lives in the South. We are witness to Sarat's coming-of-age, shaped by growing up in the shadow of conflict. This is an exceptional novel about the effects of war on the people forced to live through it.

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