The Saucy Wenches Book Club

"There is a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is a certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true."

~ Henry Fielding "The History of Tome Jones a Foundling"

Click through to see what we're reading this week!! 

My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself. They featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them; images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Inland Exodus filled them with the coastal displaced. A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious.

~ American War, Omar El Akkad

"The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution."

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone
~~J.K. Rowling

This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.
American War speculates about a second U.S. Civil War, set a few decades into the future. 2074–2095 to be exact.

It isn’t so much about why they fought a war, though that was interesting. It is about what happens when people give in to war as the solution. Once they blindly embrace the nationalist flag waving, the deep conviction that their side supports a cause noble enough to justify mass murder. Once they become so damaged, the only things that matter are exacting revenge and never, ever surrendering.

How endless cycles of violence begin.

How terrorists are born.

I was excited to find this book. I thought it might allow me to vent feelings of frustration at the current political quagmire in the U.S., but it did not. American War scared the crap out of me. And it made the destruction of a country and a culture very personal; it inflicted the ongoing devastation on people I cared about. It’s not a “war book”, it’s a book about a famil…