Publishers Weekly
01/31/2019
In a searing and moving memoir, King recounts her service in Iraq, her life after Iraq, and the war’s lasting effects on her. Deploying in 2006 as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic in the U.S. Army, the 19-year-old King’s duties included recovering vehicles hit by explosives and “bagging and tagging” the mangled corpses of those who died in them. She recounts the way the U.S. Armed Forces interacted with Iraqis: “We carried out our missions the way we saw fit... raiding houses, trashing rooms, desecrating prayer rugs and kicking over shrines of Muhammad.” The soldiers treated all Iraqis, including children, as potential terrorists, she writes. Once home and pregnant with twins, King suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which she tried to hide from her family. Interwoven are flashbacks to her childhood, her abusive and short-lived first marriage, her wartime affair with the father of her twin boys, and the ways the war has affected her relationship with her sons (they learned early not to play with the knives she carried in her purse). As she reflects on the many ways she brought the war home with her, King reveals the unique burdens borne by female veterans as they reintegrate into a society that seems oblivious to all they’ve been through. This is a harrowing and powerful book. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"An absolutely compelling war memoir marked by the author's incredible strength of character and vulnerability."—Kirkus, starred review
David Abrams
“In her memoir about a combat deployment to Iraq, army veteran Brooke King writes, ‘Nothing good survives war.’ I would beg to differ: King went to war, lived through months of unthinkable horrors, and returned with a very good book in her duffel bag. War Flower will leave no reader unmoved, no soul unscathed.”—David Abrams, author of Brave Deeds and Fobbit
Military Spouse Book Review
"Love, regret, sex, death, mistakes, forgiveness–it’s real in the military and everywhere, and nothing is easy, but people contain a million things, and the beauty of writing is that the author decides what to keep, and what to let get away."—Military Spouse Book Review
Tracy Crow
“Searing with unapologetic candor and grit—even during its surprising, fragmented moments of breathtaking, heartbreaking poeticism—Brooke King’s War Flower sweeps aside all veils of illusion regarding the impact of trauma and moral injury on the human psyche, while also illuminating the disturbing cross-generational consequences of war. For those who have asked for years: Where are the combat memoirs from women veterans? brace for impact.”—Tracy Crow, coeditor of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan
From the Inside - Jade Anna Hughes
"War Flower provides a different, but necessary perspective on modern war, and on war as a female soldier."—Jade Anna Hughes, From the Inside
Military Times - J. Ford Huffman
"War Flower is full of such frank emotion and explicit intimacy, the story of an Iraq veteran whose perspective is alternately chilling and charming."—J. Ford Huffman, Military Times
Brian Turner
“Raw and unvarnished, as it must be, combat veteran Brooke King’s memoir War Flower is a searing and unforgettable journey through death and dying, both at war and on the home front—as a child and as a mother, as a soldier and as a civilian. She somehow manages to braid several memoirs into one, offering several lenses into the battlefield of the mind, and the result is a book that has earned its place on the high shelf of American literature. While War Flower is set to ‘the tuned pitch of human pain,’ this is a book about survival. I’ve waited for this book for many years now, and yet, as I turn the last page, I’m stunned in the reading of it.”—Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country and Here, Bullet
Radioactive Book Reviews
"This book is an amazing way to get to know how deeply affected people are by war in general, and how hard it is to come back to your normal life after that."—Radioactive Book Reviews
