Rania Abouzeid

A fascinating, grisly book on the war in Syria up to the publication date of 2018. This was no dry history, but a fast-paced story with interesting characters, a story that often read like fiction. Much of the drama was from her own eye-witness accounts and much of it from interviews later.

This was my first real picture of Bashar al-Assad's chaotic opposition -- not just one group, but many factions of opponents, all wanting to control the country after the dictator was toppled. There were show more college-age revolutionaries who, though Islamic, wanted a secular government, and many Islamist factions, including al-Queda and ISIS, who fought with and killed each other. And so many civilians caught in the cross-fire and bombings.

The war in Syria has disappeared from the news but is, apparently, not over. Now I'll need to find a book that covers post-2018.

The book has a pretty good map of Syria, though it sometimes helped to consult Google Maps.

Highly recommended! show less

(i wish the author's note at the end was actually at the beginning. i think it would have set the scene better and really helped us understand how the author got these stories and accounts, and the book probably would have affected me more as i read it.)

this was informative, but not quite what i thought it would be, until closer to the end. there's a lot of historical information here, which i was glad to get. i thought we'd get it through the story of the girls or their families, but we get show more it in a more academic way. i think this is a very good book for young adults, but as an adult i wish i'd instead read her longer nonfiction book, no turning back, which i'd expect to rate higher. still, an impressive amount of clandestine reporting went into this (which i didn't realize until that author's note), and she was doing dangerous and important work. show less

Please see my review on Amazon.com under C. Wong. Thank you.