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The Boy from Aleppo who Painted the War by Sumia Sukkar (view source)
Revision as of 15:57, 3 February 2015
, 15:57, 3 February 2015no edit summary
Inevitably, a book like this is going to invite parallels with [[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon]]. But that would be specious. The only thing the two books have in common is that they are both narrated by a challenged teenage boy. In some ways ''The Boy from Aleppo'' is not about the narrator at all. It is about the way a civil war affects a family, a community and a city, and about the way a boy who has all the understanding of a small child tries to make sense of this.
This is one of those books that, like [[The Help by Katherine Kathryn Stockett]] and ''Birdsong'' by Sebastien Faulks, should become compulsory reading in schools for its simple truths. It leaves you filled with nothing more than a sense of the utter futility and indiscriminate nature of war.
Should you read it? Yes, yes, yes.