porlarta's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
skylar2's review against another edition
5.0
American War gives an excellent portrayal of how hate can become internalized and passed on from one generation to the next. While set in a fictional future United States, the historical parallels are unmistakable.
mikernc's review against another edition
5.0
I made a few efforts to write a review, but they all came out sounding condescending. Read the book; come to your own conclusions. Recommended.
marmoset737's review against another edition
4.0
Biggest complaint is that the last 100 pages felt rushed - could have read more in this world. But a really interesting premise and fairly terrifying. I think it says something - not sure what - that I forgot this book was dystopian. I also couldn't read it before bed...
kylegarvey's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Melancholy dystopia. The 2017-era American War is a book very indebted to its time. Every book very easily is, but especially one guided so much by vagaries of politics and environment (both natural and societal)… 'Sarat' is our main character. Her unusual name is explained with a mix-up around Sara T., but why El Akkad chose it is still a mystery fictionally, I guess. Sarat in Arabic's "belly"? The novel is told from the POV she has and, later, the POV of her beloved nephew Benjamin.
In 2074, after a bill passes banning fossil fuels, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas secede and start another American Civil War. South Carolina's quickly incapacitated by a virus dubbed "The Slow" and Texas is occupied by Mexico, so the remaining bloc of "Free Southern States" (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, or "The Mag") continues to fight.
Sarat's older brother Simon is a climate refugee like her, moved around awkwardly, soon enough orphaned, wounded badly in a massacre ("all his terminal patients, those who long ago graduated from 'This will help' to 'This can’t hurt'" (21)). Sarat's a heroine at start but, by the end, obviously enough anti-heroine? Always annoyed by identity, though, still: "So we’re not Northerners because we’re from the South, and we’re not Southerners because we tried to move north… Tell me what we are, then. Tell me what we are" (73).
Important things are missing here, probably intentionally: race (In important politics), abortion and gay/trans rights and other niceties (in wedge politics). Except later in the book when racism does crop up fleetingly, almost parenthetically: "Christ, are you serious?' she said. 'So you got no fear about picking up a gun and going to the Tennessee line, but you’re too scared to go into your own people’s neighborhood because they got different skin?" (395). But the issues of my time don't necessarily hold as tightly future people? About empathy again, as always?…
Similar for huge, non-issue things, like Hawaii and Japan: when/how did they disappear? I assume those would figure in to American War pretty solidly, but I don't recall quite how. I assume nice evacuation, everyone safe and happy? "See, most of these boys’ problem is they’re too dumb to realize you gotta eat a little shit to get ahead,' the driver said. 'They get it in one hand and spend it with the other. They got no discipline. But I got discipline. Yes sir, I got discipline'" (100). This war's guided, sorta, by drones from the North, now rogue murder bots, called Birds.
War as war. Who says? Not me. "Then show us who does have a say. You give us that man to talk to.' 'There is no one man, and you know it,' the priest said. 'There’s just the war. The war has say. And the war says five of you have to wait another night.'" (108). Refugee camp then? "Mississippi. Row thirty-six, tent fourteen,' the assistant said. 'Remember that—it’s your address now.' In the purple light of dusk, the Chestnuts walked into the huge tent favela that would, until the night of the great massacre [referred to, later, just as "Patience"], serve as their city of refuge" (117).
Other dramas crop up occasionally (eg., religion; "some soft-boiled Baptist from Atlanta instead. You know the kind—God’s heavenly plan this, God’s heavenly plan that.' Lara checked the time on Martina’s tablet. 'That reminds me,” she said. 'You coming to the service?'" (132). Or life itself; "Martina excused herself and walked back to her tent. In these hours the camp was at its calmest, and the tents running afield in all directions were beautiful in a rugged, delicate way—strange desert fauna reticent and frozen, a harvest of life" (161)…
(Or, eg., cooperative spirit; "Is she ever going to like us, then?' 'She’s gonna like us when she sees all the food we got her,' Sarat replied. 'Maybe we should just take her back to the creek,' Marcus said, but Sarat brushed him off. She reached into her sack and began laying out the leaves and berries in small mounds on the far end of the pen from where the turtle had backed itself into a corner. Reluctantly, Marcus followed, setting the mushroom heads on the blanket. 'Not like that,'" (174). Or personal ethos; "You’re not coming in here covered in shit,' Martina said. 'You did this to yourself, you go get yourself cleaned up. Nobody fixing your messes from here on in but you" (185) and "Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them" (193).)
Always, Southern self-image is considered, powerfully, meditatively: "Beyond them, and beyond the tent in the distance, the soft white lights of the camp’s main gate burned. And beyond those gates the great Southern world, its cratered cities and salt-eaten coasts and parched, blistered gut, lay waiting. It was a world that for Sarat now existed only in the fiery sermons of radio preachers and the lyrics of war songs and the bucolic pastorals of Free Southern State propaganda. It was an abstraction, an idea, nothing more" (197). And, furthermore, "Even back then, you could see it coming,' said Gaines. 'Before the first bombs fell, before the slaughter in East Texas, everyone knew this country was getting ready to tear itself to shreds. I was worried for my family, worried about whether I could keep my wife and daughter safe" (240)
Gaines says on 242 he "sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I’d had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind" (242). All this, then, 'right or wrong', it burns on for the South. But not just for them: in general too: "It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men’s minds" (309).
Real-life, day-to-day politics just occasionally, eerily drop back in: "Ever since what happened at Patience [that massacre], things have gotten bad again. In Atlanta you got the Free Southern State and the United Rebels fighting over who’s gonna run the country, but neither of them got much control over anything no more. The fighting’s gotten real bad and everybody’s just waiting on the Blues to push south past Tennessee. Then you know there’s gonna be a run on the banks and President Kershaw’s gonna lock us out to keep the whole Mag from going broke" (313).
All this, then, 'right or wrong', it burns on for the South still. And especially for our heroine, slowly, slowly, becoming anti-heroine. But not just for her in particular or for Southerners more broadly: in general too: "From the speakers came the sound of bourbon-clouded piano keys. A shredded nightgown of a song. You moved like honey, in my dream last night. Sarat undressed. She set her shirt over the lamp shade, and the soft light turned from amber to blood. The shirt depicted the flag of South Carolina, drawn against a red background instead of blue" (364).
Guantanamo, by the way, is now Sugarloaf. "The bodies flew, dumb as idols, over the Florida Sea" (410). What awaits Sarat there is torture of a terrible kind. But after that we still see some eerie clippings, World War Z-like, signifying larger political sweep, worries: "I told the President’s people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over" (466). And spoiler alert, or (unfortunately, reality alert?) it never was.
But nevertheless -- and here Sarat's nephew Benjamin takes over narrating the book -- there was "a passing flicker of admiration in the way she observed me" (473). An older Sarat also reconnects with Marcus, that childhood friend she had, who kept the turtle with her: "He was smiling and when he smiled she felt as though she could walk to the doors of the church and open them and find a different world waiting" (489). And years later, Sarat also meets up with one of the men who tortured her: Bud Baker. It's like the awkward but adorable conclusion of Sorrentino's film This Must Be the Place: after a crime of the worst kind, genocidal, humongously evil, there's some kind of happiness?
"COL. SINGER: Neither of these boys knew that millions of lives were at stake, Senator. At the time, the Tennessee line had been quiet for the better part of a year. The Reunification Ceremony was just a couple of days away. All those two boys would have seen on that day was a busful of sick people headed north for treatment…" begins one of those Congressional transcripts, reminding us of political urgency the book has in its alt-future landscape, "I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect that, in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness. SEN. AIKENS: No, Colonel. I suppose it wouldn’t" (541). Anti-kindness real Southerner then, yeah.
And in conclusion, I guess -- I guess, and then El Akkad writes what I guess; or is it the other way around? I already forgot -- Southerners will be Southerners. There's just no getting around THAT: "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" (549). So we're left with just a convenient paradox, again, a pretty paradox, to try to explain Southern attitudes; all we have, all they have, all there is.
shereadsshedrinks's review against another edition
5.0
A really great dystopia, tragic and sweeping. Language was beautiful, and a few lines were so perfect they took my breath away.
loganmaloney's review against another edition
3.0
First half of the book: 4 stars
Second half of the book: 2 stars
There are so many things in the book that was frustrating to read but the premise was a good idea. One thing I didn’t enjoy about this book was that whenever a storyline would get semi-decent, the author would jump to the next stage in Sarat’s life. Also it seems like one of the main reasons why this happened was to mainly focus on the development of the character but the problem was that she did not change one bit from beginning to end, she just got some more scars.
I really don’t think anyone should read this unless they really really love the idea of this book then it could be interesting
Second half of the book: 2 stars
There are so many things in the book that was frustrating to read but the premise was a good idea. One thing I didn’t enjoy about this book was that whenever a storyline would get semi-decent, the author would jump to the next stage in Sarat’s life. Also it seems like one of the main reasons why this happened was to mainly focus on the development of the character but the problem was that she did not change one bit from beginning to end, she just got some more scars.
I really don’t think anyone should read this unless they really really love the idea of this book then it could be interesting