American War (Akkad) - Book Reviews

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