Bookish Brews Snapshot
War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi
In war-torn Nigeria, two mech soldiers are torn apart in battle and spend their lives growing apart in separate areas, but spend their time dreaming of peace and coming back together to spend their lives in peace.
⏱️ Fast Paced 🌳 Family Focused 👁️ Multiple POV 🎲 Plot Twists
- Genre: Science Fiction, Young Adult
Book Review
Honest, real, difficult, yearning, high tech
War Girls follows two sisters who have been separated in the midst of a mech filled, high tech civil war. Specifically the Nigerian Civil War. That’s right! This book is an incredibly cool, important and heart wrenching retelling of the very war that Tochi’s grandparents lived through in Nigeria. If you don’t know much about the Nigerian Civil War before going into this book, I highly recommend reading up a little bit on it. It makes this book so much more enjoyable and so much more real.
I went in knowing how personal this book is to Tochi and his family, so I really took care to take in each piece into my heart. To help Tochi immortalize experiences of his family. I made sure to remember that underneath all of the advanced technology lay bare much more truth than it seems. From the brain washing of the android child soldiers, to the foreign aid given to Nigeria, each piece had a little sting in my heart to remind me that much of it was based in truth.
This book does have a lot of real and serious undertones that, if you know the background, really help you feel the depth of this book. However, if you take it at surface level, it is still wonderful. On the surface, it is an action packed story of two incredibly strong found sisters fighting against the odds to love and remember each other, despite their distance. If you love high tech war stories, giant mechs fighting, found family, strong female characters, action filled fast paced stories, you will love War Girls.
War Girls is a wonderful work of war time science fiction based in the strong relationship and sweet love of two sisters despite the odds. Tochi Onyebuchi writes a personal, action packed, fast paced story full of rich history and based on the Nigerian Civil War.
