Walk Toward the Rising Sun: From Child Soldier to Ambassador of Peace
by Ger Duany with Garen Thomas
High School    Make Me a World/Random    320 pp.    g
9/20    978-1-5247-1940-1    $18.99
Library ed.  978-1-5247-1941-8    $21.99
e-book ed.  978-1-5247-1942-5    $11.99

In this vivid memoir, Duany recounts his experience as a Lost Boy. After surviving an ambush, six-year-old Ger and his family flee their village in South Sudan, the first of many moves during the Second Sudanese Civil War. While his father and older brothers fight for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), Ger feels pressured to care for his younger siblings, and struggles to define his own role. As instability ensues, and despite his brother’s pleas to focus on school, Ger begins fighting other boys in refugee camps and ultimately becomes a child soldier, cleaning weapons and running errands for older SPLA soldiers. After a particularly violent clash, Ger seizes on an opportunity to escape the rising tensions around him and be moved to the United States, via Ethiopia, Kenya, and Germany, eventually becoming a model, an actor, and a peace activist. Duany incorporates words and customs of his native Nuer people, providing authenticity and specificity to the narrative. The matter-of-fact descriptions of loss and violence, coupled with Duany’s unabashed honesty about the emotional impact of trauma (including descriptions of crying, nightmares, insomnia, and other effects of PTSD), make this a powerful account.

From the January/February 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.