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.