A Brighter Fear - Kerry Drewery

An impossible love story set against the backdrop of the Iraq war, A Brighter Fear will appeal to everyone who loved a gathering light. This debut novel is the story of Lina, a teenage girl from Baghdad, and it starts as the bombs fall in 2003. It is a love story: for a country, and for a person too. There is an object that is lost, but may yet be found again.

 

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Not sure why this is described as a love story. While there is the inkling of a maybe romance, it's not really the focus of the story. This story IS about Lina, a sixteen year old girl living in in Baghdad near the end of Saddam Hussein's reign. In fact, she experiences the fall of Baghdad. We meet Lina and her family right before that point. Her mother, kidnapped three years ago, remains missing. American soldiers are posted all over town and war feels inevitable. Still, Lina desperately wants to maintain a normal teen life -- school, friends, flirtations, the whole bit. 

 

Over time Lina becomes very frustrated with the shift in the feel of her town. The new government promises liberation. This "liberation" shows itself in women being kidnapped, raped, sometimes killed, their freedoms removed. Women try to find a modicum of protection by going back to wearing hijabs and abayas (full body covering) full time. For Lina, there is added pressure because her family is Christian so her Islamic friends are now terrified to associate with her or her family, fearful that they will be captured as presumed enemies of the new regime. Due to political and cultural tensions, kidnappings and such, Lina watches her class size diminish over time. She fears the day when they might come for her, but she doesn't want to let go of her educational opportunities and refuses to hide in terror. 

 

I was living in a horror film with no end credits in sight. But this wasn't a film, or a dream, or a story. This was life. And I couldn't just press the off button, or wake up, or slam the pages shut. 

 

I had to live it. 

 

But I couldn't any longer.

 

I was surprised to find that this is considered a YA novel. There's some seriously hardcore stuff in here that made me audibly gasp and cringe as I was reading, mainly the descriptions of the innocent women, taken as prisoners of war, being violently beaten, raped, electrocuted, only given enough food and water to barely keep them alive until they would finally succumb to death. That being said, I think this book is a must read, at least once, for anyone and everyone, but especially Americans. Our news programs tend to sell us on the idea that our government is always right and just in their decisions to interfere with other countries. There's also a disturbingly high level of xenophobia in this country -- particularly towards anyone of Middle Eastern heritage and this book is just one of many that will powerfully show you how immature that mindset is. This book shows that, regardless of where we come from, we are all people, we all have families we care about. I really appreciated how this little novel looks at both sides of the war, the good and the bad.

 

Drewery's writing style is so stunning to boot. One of my favorite reads this year.