“Raw and unvarnished, as it must be, combat veteran Brooke King’s memoir War Flower is a searing and unforgettable journey through death and dying, both at war and on the home front—as a child and as a mother, as a soldier and as a civilian. She somehow manages to braid several memoirs into one, offering several lenses into the battlefield of the mind, and the result is a book that has earned its place on the high shelf of American literature. While War Flower is set to ‘the tuned pitch of human pain,’ this is a book about survival. I’ve waited for this book for many years now, and yet, as I turn the last page, I’m stunned in the reading of it.”—Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country and Here, Bullet

“Searing with unapologetic candor and grit—even during its surprising, fragmented moments of breathtaking, heartbreaking poeticism—Brooke King’s War Flower sweeps aside all veils of illusion regarding the impact of trauma and moral injury on the human psyche, while also illuminating the disturbing cross-generational consequences of war. For those who have asked for years: Where are the combat memoirs from women veterans? brace for impact.”—Tracy Crow, coeditor of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan

“In her memoir about a combat deployment to Iraq, army veteran Brooke King writes, ‘Nothing good survives war.’ I would beg to differ: King went to war, lived through months of unthinkable horrors, and returned with a very good book in her duffel bag. War Flower will leave no reader unmoved, no soul unscathed.”—David Abrams, author of Brave Deeds and Fobbit