For anyone hesitating to read A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah because of how gruesome war can be, I thought the author found that delicate balance between choosing to graze over some of those things and sharing some of the other harder details of the war he went through.

But, of course, that’s just me.

Still, before I discovered the way Beah balanced this heavy topic out, I knew this one would be a hard book to read. But I didn’t want to shy away from it because of everything I could imagine that would be in this story – and everything I couldn’t.

As I was reading, there were times when I took breaks from the world the author had once been a part of. These small breaths always made me think about how Beah did not have the luxury I gave to myself in my safer world from afar. And I wondered how long I could’ve held onto who I wanted to be if I’d been there with him. At other times, I’d just stare off and think about what I’d just read. More than once, I held the tears back, ran my hand over the page and felt the anger rise.

Not just for the author but for all of them – they were just children.

And I thought to myself, how much does a person, a child, have to lose before they become a part of the darkness? When one gets hit with an alignment of events that only keep cutting, what is that final pain that would make any grown adult crumble? 

In A Long Way Gone, then twelve-year-old Beah showed his audience what his own threshold was when he finally became a child soldier and gave readers a glimpse into his thoughts and actions at the lowest time in his life. And I wondered, how does a person come back from something like this? How does all the loss, both taken from him and those he took from others, how does such a black hole of a story find the light again?

While I abstractly knew it’d be through the love of people who would one day become friends and like family, I still couldn’t see how. Because what do you say? When is silence better? Does patience ever falter at some point? Does steadfastness begin to wither somewhere along the way from doubting rehabilitation is possible?

Because how does someone help a child soldier find their way back? 

Filled with all the answers to my questions and more, in my eyes, Ishmael Beah is a beautiful soul and wonderful storyteller who knows how to end the story. While the following words won’t be found at the end of the author’s book, they are one of my favorite parts within it and why I chose the night sky for the background pic for this story…

“When I was a child, my grandmother told me that the sky speaks to those who look and listen to it. She said, ‘In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy, and confusion.’ That night I wanted the sky to talk to me.”