Maybe peace is just war taking a rest. Maybe war never really ends. from Sing to Me by Jesse Browner

Hani has lost his whole world. First, his mother. Then, his father and beloved sister Arinna, singer of songs, left to take the crop to the city. They never returned. On his journey to find Arianna, Hani lost his last friend, his wise donkey. Hani traveled for days to the walls of the great city, now a scene of carnage and toppled walls. The war has ended and there is no one left.

Hani might be the last person alive on earth.

But he finds an enemy soldier who is not dead. He takes a leap of trust and aids the man. They learn to communicate. Hani believes he has found his home in this other being.

The world has been severely wounded but it is not dead yet. from Sing to Me by Jesse Browner

Hani discovers that “the world is reborn every time you remember those you have lost,” a consolation that helps him face this new world.

Sing to Me is an elegy, timeless in wisdom, the story of war through the experience of a child. Hani learns about grief, the briefness of life and the consolation of memory.

Hani questions: If kings and warriors knew about war’s destruction, would they still start wars? Sadly, we know the answer.

This beautiful and poignant novel should become a classic.

Thanks to Little Brown Company for a free book through NetGalley.

This book opens with main character Hani preparing to leave home for “the city.” His father and sister have not returned and he plans to find them. Hani is 11 yrs old and appears to be the last inhabitant of the village. There is little to identify exactly where and when this story takes place but it is a common enough theme of the countryside being devastated by a war between people who have little relation or reality to the village people. I like Hani. He is funny and brave and introspective for a young bou, although several times it is implied that in his culture 11 is practically an adult. This was an engrossing story but its ending was far too abrupt for me.

Thank you to Little, Brown and Company, Jesse Browner, and NetGalley for this Advanced Reader’s Copy in exchange for an honest review.

Set after the fall of Troy, ‘Sing to Me’ follows an eleven-year-old boy (Hani) through the ruined city in search of his lost sister. Everyone he knew is a ghost, long-gone with no evidence that they had ever lived but for his own memories and the marks they left upon his abandoned farm.

Browner delivers an elegy, simultaneously ancient and timeless. The guileless observation only a child’s mind can deliver collides with the barbarity of the cost of war. Bodies line the city—the scent clings to Hani’s nose and loincloth, yet he lingers. The invented language shared between he and his lost sister creates the pretext to a very new system of communication as Hani stumbles across the dead, the dying, and the walking soulless.

The best information I can offer fellow readers is my humble prediction that this will be regarded as a modern classic: a gap filled in the literature we regard as canon. But I must also offer a caution—what gives this story its power are the evil machinations witnessed through the naïve eyes of a child. Can strange adults become friends? Was that an offer of slavery or of a favor?

To describe this as anything but an elegy to the innocents who paid the cost of war would be to do Browner’s work an injustice. Truly a triumph and an honor to read and review.