...perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home? [loc. 2110]
Set in a near-future America ravaged by climate change: the Second Civil War is being waged over the use of fossil fuels, and Sarat Chestnut, whose family hail from the Louisiana coast, spends much of her childhood and adolescence in a refugee camp, where she's befriended (or groomed) by a recruiter for the Southern rebels.
She loses everyone dear to her; she becomes a killer; she is captured by the enemy, and tortured until she confesses to crimes she hasn't committed; she is set free, at least physically, and returns to what's left of her family. She wants vengeance, and a way of achieving it is offered to her by the representative of a foreign power.
That's a stark summation of the novel. I am conflicted about it. I didn't like the characters; they did not feel especially American; I did not believe in the stated causes of the war. Yet I do think that American War is a powerful depiction of what it takes to drive someone to commit atrocity. The future it depicts is bleak -- though the long upheavals of the Middle East have coalesced into a new empire, and the flow of migration to Europe has reversed, with flotillas heading south across the Mediterranean -- and the world is irrevocably changed.
Not a cheerful read, and not wholly satisfactory as a story, but it engaged my attention.
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