War Flower

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What to expect

Brooke King has been asked over and over what it’s like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. The answers people seek lie in the graphic details of war—the sex, death, violence, and reality of it all as she experienced it. In her riveting memoir War Flower, King breaks her silence and reveals the truth about her experience as a soldier in Iraq. Find out what happens when the sex turns into secret affairs, the violence is turned up to eleven, and how King’s feelings for a country she knew nothing about as a nineteen-year-old become more disturbing to her as a thirty-year-old mother writing it all down before her memories fade into oblivion.

The story of a girl who went to war and returned home a woman, War Flower gathers the enduring remembrances of a soldier coming to grips with post-traumatic stress disorder. As King recalls her time in Iraq, she reflects on what violence does to a woman and how the psychic wounds of combat are unwittingly passed down from mother to children. War Flower is ultimately a profound meditation on what it means to have been a woman in a war zone and an unsettling exposé on war and its lingering aftershocks. For veterans such as King, the toughest lesson of service is that in the mind, some wars never end—even after you come home.

Critics Review

  • “War Flower is full of such frank emotion and explicit intimacy, the story of an Iraq veteran whose perspective is alternately chilling and charming.”

    Military Times

  • “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 Reviews

  • “An absolutely compelling war memoir marked by the author’s incredible strength of character and vulnerability.”

    Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  • “A searing and moving memoir…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.”

    Publishers Weekly

  • “Raw and unvarnished…War Flower is a searing and unforgettable journey through death and dying, both at war and on the home front.”

    Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country

  • “Searing with unapologetic candor and grit—even during its surprising, fragmented moments of breathtaking, heartbreaking poeticism.”

    Tracy Crow, coeditor of It's My Country Too

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