This is a distrubing story - moreso because of the authentic voices found within it. Peter Dickinson writes books that make you think. He will never be the most popular author but he is one you should definitely read. ( )

Grades 6 to 8. Set in a fictional African nation, the story of a boy soldiers trained to use his AD-47 and fight in a guerrilla war.

Guerrillas in an African country . Paul was found as a 5 year old and has been trained by the leader to fight in this civil war. When peace comes, he buries his AK in the bush rather than hand it in. The leader becomes his “father” and an MP and for a short while life goes on normally until there is a coup & his Father is imprisoned & his friends’ families are shot. So with his friends in danger, they travel to the bush, dig up the AK and Paul goes back to try & free his father. While staying at a market place, a gang warfare over water from the stand pipes sparks a catalyst for the coup to be overthrown. 2 alternate endings both set 10 years on. P156. “That evening….” Until “…didn’t move.” P. 159 When the Deathslinger gang comes to the market place.

Paul is a child soldier in Africa en has his own AK (rifle). During the civil ware a troop of soldiers accepted the homeless orphan and fortunately for him they were decent folk. Every boy got his own 'mentor' to help them adapt. hiw mentor starts to like him so much that he wants to become his father and Paul decides that the war is his mother since she gave birth to him as he is now.

During a peaceful interlude Paul gets the chance to go to school. Unfortunately the peace is short-lived and Paul has to escape and try to find his new father (who as a member of the new government was imprisoned by the rebels).

It is a good childrens book IMHO. Paul is slightly too good to be real, but as the hero in a youth book he *can* be. At the same time a lot of difficult themes are introduced in this book. Tribal war, gender differences, civil war to mention a few. The book makes you realize how many problems you have to deal with and how you can do that in such an instable environment.

Quote from the book:
"During the winter offensive two years back the commando had mined a road and lain in ambush, waiting for the soldiers who used it, but then the army trucks had come past behind a battered old pick-up driven by a farmer. The soldiers kept their guns on him, forcing him to follow the road. A boy, his son probabely, sat beside him. His wheel had gone over the mine. Paul had seen the boy’s body twisting through the air, his arms spread wide as though he had learnt to fly. The trucks had swung round the wreckage and roared on. Micheal had talked to the Warriors about it that night.

“Don’t tell yourselves it is only one of those things that happens in a war. Don’t argue this way – we have right and justice on our side, so we must act, we must fight. This is true, but the next part of the argument is false. We are right, but that doesn’t make everything we do right also. It wasn’t right for this man and this boy to die. When your enemies are strong and you are weak you musn’t say to yourself “I cannot strike them directly, so I will strike elsewhere”’. Next step after that you’ll be putting car-bombs into crowded markets and burning villages whose people are too scared to help you and executing foreign aid workers. And soon the rightness that was on your side is dead. It could no longer breathe, because it was smothered by the wrongness of the things you did for its sake.”