Customer Reviews
A simple and powerful story - By: Gordon Eldridge, 19 Feb 2008 
This story is simply told. There are no fancy literary flourishes designed to manipulate the reader's emotions & no eloquent explanations designed to sway us to a particular viewpoint. It is the simple story of a child unwittingly caught upin the appalling violence of civil war. The narrator tells his own story. It is the story of how civil war destroys the normality of lifein his village, of how he runs from the advancing violence, but eventually cannot avoid being drafted into its very heart as a child soldier. He describes the process of desensitization that allows him to survive the horrors he participatesin & the even more difficult process of learning to re-engage with civil society once he has been rescued from the battlefield.
Some readers may be disappointed by the fact that the book provides only very limited historical background to the conflictin Sierra Leone & by the fact that the narrator engagesin only very limited introspection about what he has experienced. The plot also contains a few scenes that come across as a bit contrived & unlikely, but none of this detracts from the picture that is painted of the horrors of child soldiers involvedin civil war. The power of the story liesin its simplicity &in the fact that we know it is being told by someone who lived through it.
Heartbreaking story of a war victim - By: Jaybird, 14 Feb 2008 
Ismael Beah's story of being caught upin the civil war of Sierra Leone, of witnessing & then taking partin atrocities, is simply written, but no less powerful for that. He writes as a child of 12, although it is clear from his afterword that he has chosen this style to give greater impact, & that as a wrtier he is capable of a much more sophisticated analysis.
This approach works & definitely makes the book accessible to teenagers, particularly teenage boys.
He has a great ear for the nuances of childhood, you can immediately connect to both his feelings of excitement, loneliness & fearin the earlier parts of the book.
His book describes all the initiations of a child soldier - the drug addiction & violent initiation ceremonies, but skims somewhat over what happened between being forced to be a child soldier & his rehabilitation.
You are also left with a feeling that some of the process of rehabilitation has been left private. There is a difficult line between honesty & indulging the reader's voyeurism. this is not a book which indulgesin violence for its own sake.
That said, Beah's description of what must have been an incredibly painful journey towards self-acceptance & rehabilitation is sometimes skimmed over. He was a child, with no real choices, but he also did some terrible things & deep down he must know that. There is none of the masterful, & intensely painful, self analysis of, say, Roman Frister,in his book "The Cap, or the Price of a Life". Perhaps Beah is still too young to write that book of his life, but I think he may have itin him.
So, an excoriating description of lifein Sierra Leone, which leaves you to fillin some the gaps yourself. An important book, because it is an honest account of a devastating issue, & an extraordinary work, given Beah's youth & disrupted education. Recommended for adults & older teenagers.
However, Beah's great work on this subject is, I suspect, still ahead of him.
