Monday, December 9, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi




War Girls is a "Young Adult" science fiction novel by author Tochi Onyebuchi.  I use those quotes around "Young Adult" for a reason.....because the book is advertised as YA and the author seems to describe it as such, but I'm not really sure it fits the genre.  And it's not just my not understanding Onyebuchi's approach to YA:  his first novel, Beasts Made of Night (Review Here), was quite clearly a member of the genre.  To make it more confusing, the book has a tagline on Amazon that describes the setting as "Black Panther-inspired Nigeria" and that tagline is most definitely a false representation of what this book is.  For what War Girls is is a science fiction re-imagining of a 1967-1970s Nigerian Civil War and the story of two young women forced as children into the conflict and the atrocities that occurred and of which they took part.

The above is not meant to be a judging of the quality of War Girls - by contrast, this book is a tremendously powerful story that may be difficult to read, but if you manage to do so, you will find it a heartbreaking tale of experiences and activities that Western audiences don't like to think about.  It's a story with tremendous characters amidst a plot that feels very real - despite the fact it deals with a world badly affected by climate change, radioactivity, and giant mecha.  It all results in a hell of a finish, and apparently this may only be the first in a series by Onyebuchi, and if that's so, I'll be there quickly for the sequel, although I'll have to brace myself before reading.

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
It is 2172, and the world is in shambles thanks to climate change and nuclear disasters leaving wide swathes of the world uninhabitable.  But in what used to be Nigeria, little of that matters: instead a civil war rages, with violence and atrocities occurring on both sides, both Nigerian and Biafran.

Adopted sisters Onyii and Ify reside in a camp in Biafran land, in a moment of stalemate for this time of war.  It is a camp filled with young women and girls - trying to grow up in the midst of this conflict while maintaining a military force to defend against Nigerian...or Biafran incursion.  Onyii was a child soldier for Biafra and their most talented mech pilot, but now all she wants is to see Ify grow and be happy.  Yet Ify, barely more than a young child, wants more than is available in the camp, and secretly uses scrounged technology to hack into Nigerian classes for higher and higher mathematics.

And then the war comes for the two of them, separating them, and putting them on opposite sides of the conflict, unaware of the other's survival.  The change in circumstance will drive each to the brink of destruction - physically and mentally - as the horrors of war come right to their doorstep, and while the two of them may survive, their sisterhood may not.....along with everything and everyone else Ify and Onyii has come to believe in.....
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War Girls is very reminiscent of a novel from last year, R.F Kuang's "The Poppy War", which takes a real life conflict filled with atrocities and shifts it into a genre setting - for that novel, fantasy, for this novel science fiction (the author acknowledges in the acknowledgments was that his initial pitch was "Gundam in Nigeria.").  Of course, unlike that novel, which follows a single character throughout, here we have two main protagonists, each on opposite sides of the war....neither of which are particularly "good" in many ways - the reader may be more sympathetic to the Biafran side I suspect, and yet what they do in the act of waging war is just as horrible if not more horrible than the Nigerian side.

And Ify and Onyii are such strong characters that seeing this all is absolutely heartbreaking and compelling at the same time - once I was able to get through the end of the first part of this novel, with me suspecting where it was going, I found it impossible to put their stories down.  Ify seems at first like the classic child prodigy, with her brilliant hacking skills and wanting to learn, but as she grows and learns from people in both nations, she finds herself both conflicted by the abuses she sees by those who call themselves her people and by the harms inflicted by her own ingenuity, leading to a choice I didn't see coming.  In a better world, Ify would be cherished and promoted, so that she could accomplish great things...but in this world, she is nearly as much a tool of destruction as her sister and is unable to rest and enjoy her own accomplishments.

Onyii similarly feels at first like a classic older sister who would do anything to protect her sister, but when all seems lost, her tragic background as a child soldier comes out, causing her to lash out at everyone who might seemingly be an enemy - and as the most talented mech pilot in Biafra, that can cause a lot of damage.  She feels camaraderie towards her sisters in the army - and maybe more than that - but also even in her rages feels sympathy towards orphans and young people without a life left of their own....although even that doesn't stop her from using them sometimes.  She has a pride in her people and their cause, and that shows when faced with those who don't respect them....especially when there's nothing obviously left to fight for, leaving her in a lurch.

And again, the war the two of them get involved with is horrible, and the impacts of child soldiering, of slaughters of innocents, of suicide bombers, of children taken and indoctrinated in other cultures....all of that is seen here in this wild and rolling plot.  And to make it worse, the rest of the world looks upon this country, with its suffering people, at best in pity, and at worst in disgust, even as they've destroyed what remains of it.  They've begun to settle space in a way that leaves little room for Nigerians like Onyii and Ify, who need a fresh peaceful start more than anything.  But the plot makes it clear that their pasts don't leave room for either of them for such a fresh start.

I realize I don't think I'm making this book sound particularly appealing, because again, it deals in some pretty damn hard themes in some damn brutal ways.  And I definitely don't want to spoil much if I can, as even I couldn't predict where the plot was actually going, up through the ending.  But trust me when I say that this is both a powerful book, and one well worth reading, even with the harshness.  People not familiar with the actual Nigerian-Biafran conflict should learn, and the atrocities that went on, that are displayed here in this sci-fi world, with its mech battles and mechanized limbs (the action scenes are done pretty damn well by the way), are still going on in some places today.  A book such as this, calling attention to them, is probably necessary, and the more who read it, the better.

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