Young Agu is barely old enough to attend school when he is forced to become a rebel soldier in a bleak, unnamed country where guerrilla forces rove through villages, sparing no one in indiscriminate bloodbaths. Kidnapped in the first few pages, Agu (who is too small to hold a gun) is handed a machete and given a choice: die or split a man in half in front of his new troop. First, he panics, while the Commandant threatens him and the enemy pleads for his life. Agu then delves into his subconscious to search for the ability to kill. He reimagines his victim as a goat; he visualizes the man who murdered his father; then small Agu can rip his victim apart.

The novel is a force field of tension between what is happening physically and psychologically to its protagonist as he struggles to reconcile his former child-self with the soldier he has become. Raped by the Commandant, dressed in bloody rags, shrinking from starvation, Agu attempts to convince himself that he is not bad, that he is only a soldier, and that God will forgive him.

To relay Agu's grisly stories, Uzodinma Iweala constructs a remarkably pure and lucid child's language, built on simplistic repetition and unconjugated verbs — a language of defense and displacement. Over the course of the book, Agu matures in the nether lands of war, where the crafts of obedience, apathy, and murder replace his village's traditional rites of passage to manhood. He knows his childhood is over — "I am knowing I am no more child so if this war is ending I cannot be going back to doing child thing" — but this coming-of-age tale does not quite leave him an adult, either.

This is no easy read: it's gory, it's lewd, and neither Agu nor his nation has a chance of turning out all right by the end. Don't read it for pleasure. Instead, read it to see Uzodinma Iweala, a young writer just out of Harvard, emerge with a voice unlike any other in contemporary literature.

-McKay McFadden