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American War
Holly says: This 2017 novel by Canadian-Egyptian Omar El Akkad taught me the literary name for one of my favorite storytelling mechanisms: historiographic metafiction. American War follows Sarat, a climate refugee who was a young child at the start of the Second American Civil War. As the country battles over fossil fuels and a large number of citizens are displaced by climate change, Sarat befriends a mysterious stranger and slowly becomes radicalized. This was one of those books that stopped me in my tracks multiple times as I rolled a phrase or a sentence around in my brain, appreciating the author's lyrical and truthful language. The story felt real, true, possible, and in some elements perhaps prescient. I’d be curious to re-read it now and see how it has held up over time. Content warnings apply.
About the Book
“Powerful . . . As haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road, and as devastating a look as the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America. . . . Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series The Hunger Games and Divergent.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.
Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.
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