I am not bad boy. I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. Set in an unnamed West African country, Iweala's first novel shows civil war from a child's viewpoint. After his mother and sister escape and his father is killed, the traumatized young narrator is discovered by guerrilla fighters. Frightened and alone, he joins the men, becoming a soldier in an impoverished army of terror headed by a charismatic and treacherous leader who tells his young followers that killing is like falling in love. You cannot be thinking about it. Writing in the boy's West African English, Iweala distills his story to the most urgent and visceral atrocities, and the scenes of bloodshed and rape are made more excruciating by the lyrical, rhythmic language. In the narrator's memories of village life, biblical stories, and creation myths, Iweala explores the mutable separation between human and beast and a child's struggle to rediscover his own humanity after war: I am some sort of beast or devil, the boy says, But I am also having mother once, and she is loving me. Readers will come away feeling shattered by this haunting, original story. --Gillian Engberg Copyright 2005 Booklist

Educated at Harvard, where his writing won a number of prizes, the Nigerian-born Iweala breaks our hearts with the story (all too realistic) of a child soldier in Africa. One of HarperCollins's top picks for the fall. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Iweala's visceral debut is unrelenting in its brutality and unremitting in its intensity. Agu, the precocious, gentle son of a village schoolteacher father and a Bible-reading mother, is dragooned into an unnamed West African nation's mad civil war-a slip of a boy forced, almost overnight, to shoulder a soldier's bloody burden. The preteen protagonist is molded into a fighting man by his demented guerrilla leader and, after witnessing his father's savage slaying, by an inchoate need to belong to some kind of family, no matter how depraved. He becomes a killer, gripped by a muddled sense of revenge as he butchers a mother and daughter when his ragtag unit raids a defenseless village; starved for both food and affection, he is sodomized by his commandant and rewarded with extra food scraps and a dry place to sleep. The subject of the 23-year-old novelist's story-Iweala is American born of Nigerian descent-is gripping enough. But even more stunning is the extraordinarily original voice with which this tale is told. The impressionistic narration by a boy constantly struggling to understand the incomprehensible is always breathless, often breathtaking and sometimes heartbreaking. Its odd singsong cadence and twisted use of tense take a few pages to get used to, but Iweala's electrifying prose soon enough propels a harrowing read. (Nov. 8) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved