Beasts of No Nation is an incredibly disturbing and tragic story of a boy named Agu who is forced to be a child soldier in the midst of war-torn Africa. The book is written in his voice, which adds a sickening dissonance between the innocence of his tone and the horrors that he experiences. Agu loses himself as he kills and rapes at his commander's orders, and the vivid descriptions accompanied by his almost primitive narration create a bleak, unsettling picture of the depravity of war and the shattering of childhood innocence. This was the most difficult book I've ever had to read, and it left me deeply disturbed after just the first few chapters. The book does a brilliant job at doing exactly what it set out to do, and creates a very distinct image of a child soldier's experience. The show covers Agu's life before the war, the chaos as the soldiers began to come, his discovery by a military commander, his transformation into a soldier, and the behaviors of his comrades and his commander. The book paints a stark picture of the physical, mental, and emotional conditions of the war-weary soldiers and treks a long, thorough journey through the various horrors of war - prostitution, rape, murder, looting, torture, and starvation. Agu struggles to understand all that he experiences, questioning God and himself as carnage and inhumanity unfold before him. The mix of childish innocence and unthinkable wartime atrocities creates an incredibly troubling novel, which makes it great at expressing what it does. 8.5/10.
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