Summary

Chapter 1

The story begins when Ishmael was only10 years old and back then he didn’t realize how terrible and imaginable war was. When Ishmael was 8 years old, him and his friends; Junior, Talloi and Mohamed has been singing ever since and decided to form a group to sing rap music and dance to it. They learned dancing and singing rap music when they visited the place where their fathers’ work which was Mobimbi. But there was one thing that Ishmael was surprised about.. he was surprise that black men who rap music, speaks English very fast and well said and with that, him and his friends starts to see, dress, sing, talk like them. In January of 1993, Ishmael, Junior and Talloi went on a trip to the town to participate in a talent show there. As they were there, they visited some towns along the way until they reach the town and meet with couple of their friends in Mattru Jong. And after the trip, the next day after they came back home, their village was attacked; everyone ran in different directions but Ishmael, Junior and Talloi, went to the village to seek for their families. Numerous of people was running towards them, you hear children screaming, women hiding.. until they realized that their journey to the village was going to be really hard, so they spent their days waiting to hear something from their families.

Chapter 2

This begins with Ishmael’s nightmares. He dreams about him carrying dead bodies in a wheelbarrow to the cemetery. The last thing he remembered about his dream was lifting a body of his own face. When he wakes up to his nightmare, he realizes that he’s in New York City, where he has been more than a month now. But living the life as a soldier now of Ishmael, he just wants things to go back to where it has been, to start a new ordinary life.