The Second American Civil War erupts in 2074 when Southern states secede rather than accept a ban on fossil fuels, and Omar El Akkad's debut novel follows a family destroyed by the conflict. Sarat Chestnut is six years old when her father dies and her family flees Louisiana for a refugee camp in Mississippi. She grows up in the camp, shaped by deprivation and violence into a weapon of war. A mysterious benefactor cultivates her anger, training her as a soldier and then an agent responsible for acts that will reverberate for generations. El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian journalist who covered Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring, inverts the usual American perspective on distant conflicts. The Southern states suffer drone strikes and proxy interventions. Refugees languish in camps while the world debates their fate. Torture produces false confessions and radicalized survivors. The novel never tells us who was right about the war's causes, only that wars create people like Sarat and that Sarats perpetuate wars. The worldbuilding extends beyond the battlefield to imagine climate change's coastal flooding, the geopolitical rise of the Bouazizi Empire stretching from North Africa to the Middle East, and the persistence of American identity under occupation. The prose is restrained, letting events speak for themselves. Readers seeking science fiction that illuminates present anxieties will find this novel uncomfortably relevant.