Book One

In this book, we meet our three main characters: 1) Hirut, a servant girl who has some sort of fire within her but it hasn’t been explored much. 2) Aster, the wife and Hirut’s boss. She is extremely jealous of Hirut, prone to violent outbursts, and oddly enough very competent when it comes to making war plans. When we first meet her she is overcome with grief for her son who has passed a year ago as she seems to be the only one to remember (and it’s just genuinely awful to lose a child). 3) Kidane, the husband and war general. He is first shown to be more kind to Hirut as she is a family friend and he is more dismissive towards Aster (probably fueling her jealousy). As the war progresses, though, he becomes unbearable. He is short with Aster and he rapes Hirut as punishment after she steals back her own gun from the dying soldier Kidane gave it to.

Overall, there is simultaneously nothing and everything happening in this book. It reads like an epic so it is quite hard to digest at times. There are interludes, photos (written accounts), and choruses that break up the chapters which are interesting in theory but off-putting in actuality. Maybe it is my lack of knowledge and interest in war strategy, but it is really hard to keep up with what’s going on and I hope it gets better when the women take duties into their own hands which has been foreshadowed.

Things I Liked:

• the structure

Things I Disliked:

• kidane
• the dense writing