American War (Akkad)

American War 
Omar El Akkad, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451493583


Summary
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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1982
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Raised—Doha, Qatar, and Canada
• Education—B.A., Queens University (Kingston, Ontario)
• Awards—National Newspaper Award (see below)
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon


Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar, until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade.

His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. He lives in Portland, Oregon. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A dystopian novel set in the no-longer-United States of America between 2075- 2095 — a time when “the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself.” Through the life of Sarat Chestnut readers learn that climate change has won, wiping out whole cities and turning once inhabitable places uninhabitable.… The writing is phenomenal; the story is compelling; the premise is terrifying. Let’s hope that while Omar El Akkad can spin a good yarn, he is in no way a psychic.  READ MORE …
Abby Fabiaschi, AUTHOR - LitLovers


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. From these incongruous ingredients, El Akkad has fashioned a surprisingly powerful novel—one that creates as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road, and as devastating a look at the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America.… El Akkad has…deftly imagined the world his characters inhabit, and writes with…propulsive verve.… He demonstrates cool assurance at using details—many gathered, it seems, during his years as a reporter—to make his fictional future feel alarmingly real. And he writes here with boldness and audacity.… El Akkad has written a novel that not only maps the harrowing effects of violence on one woman and her family, but also becomes a disturbing parable about the ruinous consequences of war on ordinary civilians.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


The novel may be set in the future, and the title may be American War, but there's nothing especially futuristic or, for that matter, distinctly American about it. This is precisely the author's point.… America is not Iraq or Syria, but it's not Denmark, either; it's a large, messy, diverse country glued together by 250-year-old paperwork composed by yeoman farmers, and our citizens seem to understand one another less by the day. Puncture the illusion of a commonwealth, El Akkad asserts, fire a few shots into the crowd and put people in camps for a decade, and watch what happens.… The novel's thriller premise notwithstanding, El Akkad applies a literary writer's care to his depiction of Sarat's psychological unpacking and the sensory details of her life.…Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it's a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.
Justin Cronin - New York Times Book Review


Follow the tributaries of today’s political combat a few decades into the future and you might arrive at something as terrifying as Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War. Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions…both poignant and horrifying.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Striking.… A most unusual novel, one featuring a gripping plot and an elegiac narrative tone.
Rayyan Al-Shawaf - Boston Globe


Astounding, gripping and eerily believable…masterful.… Both the story and the writing are lucid, succinct, powerful and persuasive.
Lawrence Hill - Toronto Globe and Mail


Sarat is a fascinating character.… Thought-provoking [and] earnest.… El Akkad’s formidable talent is to offer up a stinging rebuke of the distance with which the United States sometimes views current disasters, which are always happening somewhere else. Not this time.
Jeff VanderMeer - Los Angeles Times
 

Depicting a world uncomfortably close to the one we live in, American War is as captivating as it is deeply frightening.
Jarry Lee - Buzzfeed.com


American War is terrifying in its prescient vision of the future.
Maris Kreizman - New York / Vulture


(Starred review.) Part family chronicle, part apocalyptic fable, American War is a vivid narrative of a country collapsing in on itself, where political loyalties hardly matter given the ferocity of both sides and…[violence that] erodes any capacity for mercy or reason. This is a very dark read.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [G]ripping and frightening debut novel takes off from current American political and environmental issues to imagine a bleak and savage not-too-distant future.… Well written, inventive, and engaging. —James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) El Akkad has created a brilliantly well-crafted, profoundly shattering saga of one family’s suffering in a world of brutal power struggles, terrorism, ignorance, and vengeance. American War is a gripping, unsparing, and essential novel for dangerously contentious times. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


A dystopian vision of a future United States undone by civil war and plague.… El Akkad's novel is an allegory about present-day military occupation, from drone strikes to suicide bombers to camps full of refugees.… A well-imagined if somber window into social collapse.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The novel’s epigraphs are taken from two classic texts, an ancient Arabic book of poems and the Bible. What do the quotes and their sources suggest about the conflict that will follow in the novel?

2. Were you surprised by the way the map of the United States has been altered—the states’ borders and the landmasses themselves—in the projections for 2075? What do you think caused those changes; was it solely politics or other forces as well?

3. What does the first-person narrator we meet in the prologue explain—and not explain—about how the country has changed, the timeline of the Second American Civil War itself, and the unnamed “she” who has stayed in his memory since his youth?

4. What is the significance of Sarat’s changing of her own name when she’s a girl? How does that sense of agency and identity develop as she gets older? How does her having a twin sister fit into your understanding of her independence and actions?

5. The novel presents many different laws, agencies, and other government entities for the future America. Which did you find to be most plausible, including as sources for political conflict that would escalate into war? Are any similar to real-life policies as you’re reading about them today?

6. Describe the dynamic of the Chestnut family, parents and children. What’s similar and what’s different about domestic life in their world versus today’s and during the time of the first Civil War?

7. How pervasive is the allegiance to the Free Southern State where the Chestnuts live and throughout the cordoned region? What threats do those who disagree with the cause face?

8. How closely do the events and details of the Second American Civil War follow those of the first and/or other historical events in American history? After you finished the novel, were you more or less likely to think another such conflict could happen again in this way, on a national or global scale?

9. How do the interludes of primary source texts—textbook excerpts, government reports, notebooks, letters, etc.—enhance the personal story of Sarat and her family, in terms of the motives for and timeline of the war on a micro and macro level?

10. What gender stereotypes persist in the future between the young girls and boys, especially once the family reaches Camp Patience? How does Sarat push back against expectations of what she can and cannot do, including in contrast to her sister and brother?

11. How does the novel complicate the meaning of “home,” in a personal and national level? Does where and how a character lives at any given point determine his or her sense of security or belonging, or does this feeling come from somewhere else?

12. Sarat sees on Albert Gaines’s, a northerner’s, map different kinds of borders and observes, “To the north the land looked the same but she knew there existed some invisible fissure in the earth where her people’s country ended and the enemy’s began.” (133) How did such fissures form, and what does the outcome of the war and novel suggest about their ability to be healed?

13. How does Sarat’s plight speak to Gaines’s statement that “the first thing they try to take from you is your history”? (122)

14. What defines one’s sense of “belief” in the novel? Are people more motivated by personal beliefs, or by more institutional ones like religion or politics?

15. How are certain characters in the novel mythologized? What does this do to their day-to-day existence and their legacy? How do the mythic characters in the book parallel historical figures in what they’re remembered for and how?

16. Discuss the sequence of events and outcomes of the plague. How does that kind of warfare reflect advancements in society as well as the sense of humanity’s worth?

17. What is the role of love in the novel? By the story’s conclusion, does the idea of love conquering all still apply, or does revenge supersede it?

18. Many historians consider the first Civil War to have been a battle of the past (the South) versus the future (the North). Do those distinctions apply to the Second American Civil War, and what does this say about the future—and present—of the country and those running it?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)