A Brighter Fear by Kerry Drewery

Genre: YA Realistic Fiction
Pages: 285
Publisher: Harper Collins
Source: Bought
Format: Paperback
Rating: 4 stars
Buy the Book: Waterstones, Amazon, The Book Depository
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Blurb:
A beautiful love story and contemporary fairytale set against the backdrop of the Iraq war, this stunning and moving novel will break your heart, only to put it back together again…

This is the story of Lina, a teenage girl from Baghdad. It starts in 2003, as the bombs begin to fall on the city.

In it, Lina fights to survive, to find a life for herself amid the chaos of war, to find what happened to her mother in the years before the war, when she was taken away by the secret police. She also falls in love, with the one person she should never have fallen in love with.

It is many things. It is a love story, both for a country and for a person. It is about an amazing girl, growing up in the worst circumstances imaginable. It contains a necklace, that was lost but might still be found. And that is all we can say, without ruining this extraordinary and beautiful modern fairy tale…

Review:

I have owned this book for almost a month now but I have been putting off reading it simply because I was a bit worried about reading a book based solely on war. Not a fictional dystopian war but a real war that actually happened. I’m not a fan of history as a subject so therefore I don’t know much about the Iraq war but I didn’t need to.

This book tells the story of a Christian in Iraq called Lina and how the war affects her.The story has no overall riding plot because it is a story about many different things all at once. It is just simply about Lina’s life during the war and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. The story wasn’t really building up to something big and usually I’d find these stories boring but all the smaller plots in this book just drew me in. I really enjoyed Lina as a character because she was strong. Not in the way that most characters are but she was brave and she knew what she had to do. She had morals. I loved the fact that her love for her family and her country was so strong. She did everything to protect her family and she didn’t want to leave her country behind.

The writing in this book was beautiful. It really draws you in and hits you with all the emotions. The way everything is worded accurately showed how terrible the war is. The amount of tabs I put in this book to mark beautiful sentences is unreal.

The ending broke me. I know why what happened had to happen but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it happening(does that make any sense?). I am really dying for a sequel to find out what happens next because I feel like there is so much more to Lina’s story. I definitely recommend this book especially if you like to read books that will take you on an emotional rollercoaster. I shall definitely be picking up Kerry Drewery’s other work because this book was fabulous.