YA sci-fi that's violent but also heartrending and purpose-driven

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Tochi Onyebuchi's War Girls is a violent, tough, but important book. It begins to confront the pain and trauma of being a child of war.

The book, written for a YA audience, takes readers to the year 2172 - to the post-apocalyptic, war-torn landscape of Nigeria. This is a time and place in which advanced technology has the capability not only to pull people back from the edge of fatal injuries and illnesses - to pull people back from death - but also to decimate entire families, entire communities. Medical advances can't outweigh military advances. Not in a society that barely remembers what came before civil war.

While War Girls lives primarily in an imagined future Nigeria, the story is also powerfully informed by the past. In his prepublication author's note, Onyebuchi describes the Biafran War (or the Nigerian Civil War), as well as "the wars that ravaged the African continent in the 1990s and 2000s; wars in which children were drafted as soldiers, drugged and assaulted and manipulated and given guns as tall as them..." It's a desire, maybe even a responsibility, to bring light to these histories that drives War Girls.

Thank you to Tochi Onyebuchi, Razorbill/Penguin Random House, and Bookish First for my advance reader's copy.