Finding Time to Read & Review: Beasts of No Nation
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
To my fellow indie authors, I think we’ve been going about this traditional publication process all wrong. HarperCollins accepts short stream of consciousness manuscripts. By the way, don’t worry about paying exorbitant amounts of money for a professional copy editor, because HarperCollins accept manuscripts with absolutely no regards for the rules of grammar or standard English. However, I think it’s worth mentioning that it helps if your manuscript is narrated from the horrific and innocent experience of an African child soldier. Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation puts the reader into the mind and hopeless life of Agu, Strika, Luftenant, and Commandment. There is no other way to tell the story of child soldiers ripped from their homes forced into a life of killing, pillaging, raping, starving, molesting, and killing some more except through the raw, gritty, innocent voice of children. The ending reads like a bad break-up over text. It’s over with no more “characters” for elaboration. In the end, Iweala seems to suggest that life is what it is. Due to the narration style, some of the lines get blurred between character voices so you may have to read them twice, but once you get past the presentation and digest the meaning, you’ll find a captivating and disturbing story all rolled into one.
