Unfortunately this book did not gel with me, which is disappointing as I enjoyed the concept. This may be one for other readers.

Startlingly horrifying dystopian novel.

The writing is enriched by the author's journalistic experience. He draws on his first hand knowledge of war and refugee camps. We follow a family torn apart by the second American civil war. Climate change has happened and has caused political and humanitarian crisies.

I feel as though this could have been a much stronger novel. The concept and idea is original - and believable. It's not too hard to imagine this happening which is a great hook for any dystopian book. However there were too many stereotypes about being from the South and I had reservations about the validity of the protagonist, Surat.

While it's easy to see how someone can become twisted from the situation they are in, Surats transformation just wasnt relatable. It was very difficult to warm to her and I feel the novel would have been stronger if this was the case.

This was an enjoyable, if hard-hitting, speculative future that makes you muse on today's world. It comments on issues such as refugees and climate change with feeling.

I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up this novel, I had no idea it was going to be such a dark brutal and bleak read. This isn’t to say it’s a bad novel, it just isn’t a cheer-you-up novel. It also isn’t a particularly fast read, due to the dark and serious nature of the novel I had to take quite a few breaks to allow my brain to process everything and recover! But don’t for a second think that I didn’t enjoy this novel, it was breath-taking, and it was an incredible read.
This novel tells the story of Sarat, a woman who faces such hardship during the Second American Civil War, and is eventually turned into a weapon, a killer of the Northerners. The story is told by Benjamin, her nephew when he himself is an old man. This reflective style of plot allows a deeper understanding of the events of the plot, and also allows the reader to understand the effects the events had on the overall course of the war, and history in general.
I will admit that I don’t know very much of American geography or history, so it took me a while to fully understand what exactly was happening in this novel, and to fully grasp the ins and outs of the war itself. The author has done a brilliant job of developing the world, and you can tell that a lot of thought had gone into creating the premise of the novel.
The characters in this novel are fascinating to read about. Sarat is a particularly interesting character, we follow her from a small child through to womanhood, and the changes that she undergoes, some as a direct result of the war she survived are incredible and harrowing to read about. Sometimes she seemed so mature and much older than her age, and at other moments she could be so childlike and naïve. I grew very attached to Sarat, and really sympathised with her, even though she did some pretty terrible things.
I enjoyed reading about Sarat’s family too, although I didn’t grow as attached to them. I didn’t quite get the emotional punch that certain events featuring Sarat’s family were supposed to pack, but they were still an interesting group of characters to read about.
The author is very clever with the way he has written the narrative of the novel. By interspersing the story of Sarat and her life with articles from newspapers and other official documents about the Civil War, and events that occur before and after the storyline we are following. These are a crucial part of the excellent world building and historical detail and accuracy that the author has included, and I really enjoyed the other dimension that these more official documents lent to the diary-like narration of the majority of the novel.
Overall I really enjoyed this novel, I gave it 4.5/5 stars, it was bleak and harrowing but it made me think a lot about war and the effects it has on civilians, and the novel is definitely relevant today.

This book is terrifying because it is so very plausible. It tells the story of the Chestnut family, living in the South during the second American Civil War - a war fought over the use of fossil fuel. What I found so clever here was the ability of the author to make us think about the motivation behind the actions of an enemy and the path that has led them to where they are. El Akkad isn't an apologist for terrorist behaviour but he successfully reminds us that all people are human and have their own reasons for what they do. As I said, the book is terrifying because it paints a picture of a world that is not too different from the one in which we live and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that this is where we are heading. The characters are really well drawn and the plot moves well. It doesn't rush towards a climax, but gives the reader enough time to fully get to grips with each iteration of Sarat Chestnut before moving forward in time once again. The prose is understated and clipped - very matter of fact, which lends a feeling of credence to the narrative and the interspersed excerpts are a genius stroke giving the reader foreshadowing of the outcomes whilst also giving them a brief pause from the relentless dread. This is not an easy book but it is a book that everyone should read and think about.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

When I first heard about this book it sounded right up my dystopian street!
While I felt the premise of the war (north and south fighting over fossil fuels) was a bit unrealistic, I did like the way the book highlighted the impact of climate change on the future America. The central character is young, hard to emphathise with sometimes and I finished the book not really caring about her very much. And for me the whole thing focussed too much on the war and politics of it. That said, it is called ‘American War’ so I can’t be too annoyed!
I can totally imagine some people would really rate this book but for me it all felt a bit ‘World War Z’ without the zombies.

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. An imagining of the physical and political consequences of climate change - the power shift in the world and civil war in America. The protagonist is not always likeable and the actions she takes can be questionable, which is what makes it such a great read. I kept thinking about this book and it's themes long after I'd finished it.

The story…

Set in the near future, America as we know it has been irrevocably changed by war, natural disasters and a devastating man-made virus. Old tensions between the north and the south, reignited over the issue of fossil fuels, lead to a war that spans decades. Sarat Chesnut is just six years old when the Second American War breaks out, but she and her family are changed forever by the horrors that it unleashes. As she grows up, Sarat is drawn deeper and deeper into the shadowy world of the militant resistance and splinter groups that are determined to do whatever is required to achieve their goals.

My thoughts…

Omar El Akkad describes an America that has been torn apart by civil war. In the south, refugee camps become permanent homes for those displaced by bombs, violence and the changing, inhospitable landscape. Efforts on both sides to reduce tension generally end in failure. Young people grow up and are recruited into increasingly radical militant groups, determined to defend their home against all the odds.

Sarat is one of those young people. Faced with poverty, displacement and loss from an early age, she is drawn into playing an important role in the resistance. As readers, we’re powerless to do anything but watch as she is shaped by the world around her into an instrument of war. As she becomes more and more immersed in this world, the consequences have a huge impact on her personally.

Sarat isn’t a character that is particularly likeable or sympathetic, and there were many occasions when I disagreed with her actions, but her motivations were clear to see. Her family is torn apart, and all she’s left with is a desire for revenge and a powerful sense of cultural identity created by a group of Southern states desperate to break away from their perceived oppressors in the North.

There are some very clear parallels drawn with examples of war and violence that we see in the world around us today. The American war is portrayed as an endless cycle of self-perpetuating violence, driven by a group of people wanting to be separate from their parent state, the misuse of authority and a vicious cycle of retribution and hatred.

In conclusion…

This is the type of science fiction I like best. It imagines a future which is entirely possible, especially given the tensions in the current political climate. This makes the scenes that play out in American War even more terrifying. It raises both questions and stark warnings that remained with me long after I finished the book and that still sometimes flash into my head when I read the news. Overall, I thought it was really well written and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

Disclaimer : I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a fair review on netgalley.

This was a compelling novel, which reminded me slightly of world war z. In the future, a civil war is declared between the northern and southern states of America. The story follows Sarat, who as a young girl living in the south, is drawn into a brutal war.
I was quickly drawn into the well described world of Sarat and despite some parts (the prison camp) being hard to read, I really enjoyed it. It was however a little hard to keep track of the different factions, but I do give this book 5 stars.

American War is a timely book as the divisions in US society seem to grow day by day with battle-lines often drawn in the same old places. There's an appetite for visions of how our apparent descent into conflict and intolerance might end and they are far from cheerful. American War envisions a USA once more torn apart, North against South with the South breaking away from the Union creating a new generation of sectarianism and bloodshed. With Nazi flags marching openly in the streets who's to say this is not the future, less a dystopia than a terrifying possibility. Unfortunately it is the details that are less convincing. The failure to address race or religion in any meaningful way is difficult to understand. Considering how central these themes continue to be in contemporary US events this is a glaring omission that doesn't sit well, it seems vastly unlikely that a second civil war would be ignited by environmental issues (and the idea of the US being a world-leader in finally abandoning fossil fuels is frankly laughable) without the churning morass of these issues being incorporated into the narrative. Considering that el Akkad makes the choice to frame his main character as part-Latino and part-African-American and highlights the poverty and uncertainty of their position it leaves a yawning hole that suggests that it was too difficult to address but is also impossible to ignore.
That being said while the cause of the new conflict may be on shaky ground and it may turn a blind eye to the glaringly obvious the rapid, almost-inevitable progression and escalation of the Second Civil War el Akkad describes is chillingly plausible. The clear-eyed, sensitive dissection of how how pain, loss and hated can forge anyone into a devastating weapon is both insightful and pertinent and it would have been even more powerful if it had been attached to a character one could connect with. Unfortunately, after the first few pages Sarat becomes elusive and difficult to reach. The barriers she builds are understandable within the story but they shouldn't exist between the character and the reader, at least not permanently.

For the most part the complex structure is more of a stumbling block than an asset. The jumps in time confuse the story and often excise developments that it would have been better to experience at first-hand. The conceit of incorporating other excerpts of other sources to add context and detail is a popular one. Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace) and Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) both used real and fictional sources in their historical fiction with enormous effect and success in their historical fiction. When it works it lends great texture and depth to a story, its reality is more tangible but it works better when there is reality at the base already. Sadly, in this case, it just tangles and slows the plot, creating an illusion of complexity when really one of the main problems is that the premise of American War is not complex enough, or at least it doesn't evidence the complexity of its world effectively. For example, the political makeup of this late twenty-first-century world is quite different to our own but rather than an Orwellian world such as 1984 in which the composition of the nations and their relations was (and is) all too credible I found myself wondering several times just how these new nations and world-powers emerged. These muddy waters were frustrating hinting at such vast changes that are actually so integral to the plot without any convincing explanation severely weakens the structure of the story.

There is some lovely writing and the ideas are both compelling and worrying but ultimately the internal inconsistencies of the story and the world-building turn something that could have been groundbreaking into something frustrating.

It was hard to judge whether this book was speculative fiction, sci-fi or something else. I anticipated reading about the development of this super-assassin, base don the marketing hype, and that is not what I got. Instead, the book rambled, overlong in my view, on about her capture, torture and subsequent revenge.

It is 2074 and a second American Civil War has broken out between the Northern and Southern states of America, the (Blues) and the (Reds.)
Sarat Chestnut is six and lives with her family in a corrugated steel container in St James, Louisiana. She spends her days playing in the river and on it’s muddy banks with her twin sister Dana and her brother Simon. This is the last time she will remember being happy.
American War is a story told by Sarat’s nephew and outlines how a young girl was turned by circumstance into a deadly weapon.
Omar El Akkad never fully explains the circumstances behind the beginning of the war just that for environmental reasons the use of fossil fuels was banned and that the Southern States were reluctant to be told what to do in this matter. The planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself.
Via Sarat’s nephew we learn that following the end of the war there was a decade-long plague which was released when a rebel from the South managed to sneak into the Union capital. The plague killed ten times the number of people killed during the Civil War. We also learn that he knows who the unnamed rebel is because she was his aunt.
He is mad at her for the situation she put him in but he still loves his aunt despite all the destruction she caused.
“Sometimes I stare out at the sea for hours, well past dark, until I am elsewhere in time and elsewhere in place: back in the battered Red country where I was born.
And that’s when I see her again…And I am a child again, yet to be taken from my parents and my home, yet to be betrayed. I am back home by the riverbank and I am happy and I still love her. My secret is I still love her.
This isn’t a story about the war. It’s about ruin.”
The extract above, particularly the last line is a true reflection of American War. It is not a story about the war. It is a story about the ruin of a young girl. A character study.
One of the things that prompted me to request American War was the fact that it was set in Louisiana. I loved Louisiana a few years ago and I loved it so the idea of reading a book set there appealed to me. However, the Louisiana of American War is barely recognisable due to environmental changes.
“The coastal waters were brown and still. The sea’s mouth opened wide over ruined marshland, and every year grew wider, the water picking away at the silt and sand and clay, until the old riverside plantations and plastics factories and marine railways became unstable. Before the buildings slid into the water for good, they were stripped for their usable parts by the delta’s last holdout residents. The water swallowed the land. To the southeast, the once glorious city of New Orleans became a well within the walls of its levees.”
As a young girl Sarat was a tomboy, her mother used to say God only gave her enough girl for one of her twins. Where Dana was a daddy’s girl, Sarat had always taken after her mother. She was stubborn, hard, undaunted by calamity.
On the day we meet Sarat her father is planning on going to get a work permit to move North. Louisiana is considered a ‘purple’ state, sympathetic to the Red’s but not necessarily of them. Her father wants a better life for the family and because of this he wants to move North but his wife, Martina is not so sure. Whilst he is out getting this permit he is blown up during an attack by Southern Rebels.
Without her husband Martina is at a loss for how she will provide for her family but when she asked for help from a rebel leader he refuses to provide her and suggests she takes her family to a refugee camp named Camp Patience in Mississippi.
“In the purple light of dusk, the Chestnuts walked into the huge tent favela that would, until the night of the great massacre, serve as their city of refuge.”
The events on the night of the great massacre set Sarat on an irreversible path of revenge which change her forever. For her there can never be any talk of peace because “blood can never be unspilled.”
On the whole, I loved this book but there were a few things which caused me to rate it as 3.9. Firstly, I found the extracts of historical sources extremely dull and after I while I just began to skip them entirely.
Secondly, there was a brief period in the book where I became bored and found myself looking forward to finishing the book. However, this lasted only about the length of one chapter and was quickly forgotten.
I enjoyed the fast paced nature of American War and the beautiful writing of Akkad. Sarat was a brilliant developed character. I felt everything she was feeling and it was easy to see why she felt compelled to make the choices she did. After all, everybody fights an American War.

by Omar El Akkad
published by: Picador, 2017

In the near future, climate change, rising sea levels and war have changed the political and geographical landscape, with power shifted away from the US and into the hands of China and the Arabic Bouazizi Empire. North America has suffered catastrophic flooding and is in the grip of a second civil war over the banning of fossil fuels. The south won’t give up. South Carolina is shut off because of a crippling plague.

American War centres on Sarat, one of twins, whose family tries to make it to the north, to escape their hand-to-mouth existence in the south, but end up living for years in a sprawling refugee camp. There’s a constant threat of ‘Birds’, drones flying overhead to drop bombs, as well as from ‘homicide’ bombers carrying bombs or bacteria and viruses. The novel gives a bleak portrait of how an intelligent girl, marked out by her unusual physical size, becomes radicalised, and the terrible consequences of global warming and world war. Sarat’s story is pieced together, from her own diaries and from historical documents, by her dying nephew.

In this, Omar el Akkad’s first novel, we see a vividly realised world – the logical consequence of our love of fossil fuels and indifference to the scientific evidence for climate change. The novel is chilling in its bleak vision. But, clunky dialogue, too much ‘telling’ and a tendency to include whole chunks of description, make it disappointing. With a few more drafts and the possibility of hope (surely essential to any novel about the human species) it could have been a superb debut.

I loved this book. Grapes of Wrath meets The Water Knife. The pace and prose make this feel like a future classic and the topic is exactly right for the troubles of our time.

This is wonderful .

The idea of a second american civil war seems prescient . The plot flows , the geo politics are well defined , the characters are strong and the historical extracts are well written and feel true.

This is a fantastic novel almost flawless

In 2074, the Second American Civil War breaks out. Many coastal areas of the USA, and around the world, have been claimed by rising sea levels, a group of southern states secede from the Union over the outlawing of fossil fuels and war is declared. Sarat Chesnutt is six years old when the war starts and the book is her story, as told, many years later, by her nephew.

Written by Egyptian-born Canadian journalist, Omar el Akkad, the novel can be read as an allegory on the war on terror. Sarat, born in Louisiana of mixed race parents, is displaced by the war and spends her childhood and early teens in a refugee camp where she is gradually radicalised by a charismatic leader of the ‘Red’ southern states and used in the fight against the ‘Blue’ union majority.

By depicting climate change as the pivotal, and perhaps only, factor leading to the war, the author can possibly be accused of over-simplification - it would appear that racism, for instance, has been eliminated; there is certainly no overtly racist language or characters in the novel and religious differences too have little impact on the plot - but many of his scenes are harrowing and thought provoking.

“At first he’d asked her if she preferred to make herself a weapon, to become what the Northerners called homicide bombers.”

It is shocking when the ‘heroine’ of the novel, who has at least some Katniss Everdeen-like characteristics, is offered this choice. This is near-future America, and Americans are suicide bombers… The point is reinforced by the reverence in which the south holds Julia Templestowe, a southern martyr who wore a ‘farmer’s suit’ and blew herself up assassinating the American president. The narrator also tells us at the start of the story that, following the end of formal hostilities, on Reunification Day, “one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death” - the plague kills almost ten times the eleven million who died in the war.

Nor does the south hold a monopoly on atrocities. At the beginning of the book we are told that Carolina has essentially become a wasteland due to a chemical or germ attack by the Blue states and is “a walled hospice” - the reference to the wall is not coincidental. The North has at some point lost control of their ‘warring Birds’, drones which then randomly rain down death. The North still practices waterboarding on detainees in a Guantanamo-like interrogation centre. There is an attack on a camp in which innocents are targeted in the most brutal way in a search for ‘insurgents’.

El Akkad may have ‘simplified’ but doing so allows him to focus on key issues that should be shocking. I am not an American but it seems to me that, given the turn that western society, and US society in particular, has taken recently, perhaps the events of the novel are not as shocking as they should be; this future is not as far off as it should be. The book has flaws but the story and the issues it raises will stay with me for some time.

Initially I found the near future setting of a dystopian America rather confusing - working out what had happened and remembering the different alliances etc felt a bit like hard work! However, it was worth persevering because this is an excellent read and Sara's story is vividly rendered and compelling. This book is guaranteed to provoke discussion and would make an excellent reading group pick. Thoroughly recommended.

I was gripped throughout this really unique and thought-provoking novel. It tells the story of the second American civil war through a whole range of different types of writing and gradually the true extent of what happened is revealed to you. It was a work of art in its crafting, weaving the different aspects of the novel together and slowly telling the reader what they need to know. Some parts of the book were particularly haunting as you realise that what happened here as fiction could be a possibility in the not too distant future. Definitely one of the best books I have read in 2017.

<I>What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?</I>

A brutal book which takes the manifestations of modern war (mass migration, refugee camps, drone strikes, interrogation and torture, massacres) and gives them a twist by having them play a part in a future second civil war in America. This time the suicide bombers, the ideologically-driven preachers of hate, the recruiters of the young and impressionable, the creators of human weapons of revenge are Americans from the Southern states which have seceded from the Union for ideological reasons of their own.

This is a clever book which makes pointed comments on contemporary politics by both distancing the setting and yet making it uncomfortably close to home. Using a collage technique, the main 3rd person narrative is supplemented with reports, oral testimonies, news reports and a 1st person narrative that takes us very close to the heart of the book.

For all the good stuff, there are places where the pace slows to a crawl. I loved the beginning and was emotionally invested in the story from the start but that started to drop off a little as the book unravelled. The outcome is clear from very early on so the tension isn't about what is going to happen but about watching what we know must happen even while we wish we could stop it. A smart book, politically astute and happy to push the boundaries: 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.