Drone Child

Kidnapped for his brilliance, a 15-year-old electronics genius must fight as a drone whiz and sea-going pirate to keep his parents alive. Can he escape and also free his twin sister from the clutches of a major sex-trafficker?

Earlier Lemba worked as a self-taught Internet expert in the mega-city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while the gifted sister aspired to be a rumba star. But murderous gun-worshippers chloroformed him and whisked him away. Now, to save his mother and father from brutal deaths, Lemba must fight for the wrong side.

The crazies know exactly where his parents and dog live. The leader of his captors, the thuggish Congolese Purification Army, is a seven-foot-tall whackjob--all too handy with AK-47s and oversized machete blades.

Drone Child: A Novel of War, Family, and Survival offers a gripping, inspirational story for mature young adults and older readers. It's told as Lemba's war memoir looking back on his life as a child soldier and pirate some 25 years earlier in the 2020s. The book contains no explicit sex or explicit drug descriptions, no obscenity, and the violence is no different from what would be expected in a war novel.

This revised edition of Drone Child, originally published as No Taller than My Gun, includes a colorful new cover and discussion questions for book clubs, libraries, and schools--prepared with help from Karen Heilman, M.Ed., and the novel's two Congolese fact-checks and critiquers. One was Junior Boweya, a translator, software localization expert, and businessman. The other was Jean Felix Mwema Ngandu, a former Mandela Fellow and a leading civic activist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.