A review by dorothy_gale
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

4.0

4★: I CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE! I listened to this memoir (narrated by the author) to be able to help my nephew with one of his final high school writing assignments. That a child could endure so much is just incomprehensible. I’m curious about where Ishmael is now and how he is doing (personally not professionally). I would have appreciated an update in the epilogue more than a chronology of historical events. It appears that he has written more books, but all fiction. This was published when Ishmael was 26 and primarily covers his traumatic experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone from ages 12 to 18. Storytelling is a strong theme, and what my nephew is expected to write about, but the book ends somewhat abruptly. Ishmael struggles with talking about his experiences and opening up to people, so I suppose we can assume that his book writing was either how he overcame it OR a way to not have to repeatedly tell his story. It would have been nice to hear more about his growth and motives. And how he remembered it all given what happened to him!

Seeing how others have shelved this book, it appears to be assigned reading in many schools. At the time I finished, it had an average 4.14-star rating by 178,818 readers.