I’ve done a lot of reading on civil war and similar human-to-human conflicts, and All the Glimmering Stars is an excellent read on a difficult subject. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), headed by Joseph Kony, was a militant Christian extremist founded in Uganda in 1987. Claiming to be a prophet sent by God, he sought to overthrow the Ugandan government and establish a religious state based on the Ten Commandments. Over time, his movement becomes increasingly violent, ultimately kidnapping thousands of children (somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000) to serve as his army.

 All the Glimmering Stars is based on the real-life stories of two young people, Anthony Opoka and Florence Okori, who are kidnapped but somehow, through the immense stressors of being soldiers for the LRA. As they come of age, despite experiencing gruesome acts of war, they maintain their innate goodness, find each other, fall in love, and start a family.

The book is horrific, but author Mark Sullivan doesn’t sensationalize the atrocities but balances it with the efforts of the two youngsters to remain good human beings, thus creating a tribute to the strength of the human spirit and the power of love and good parenting. 

If you’d like further reading, I recommend They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers by Lt. General (Ret’d) Roméo Dallaire. He was the UN commander during the Rwandan Genocide in 1993-1994 so has plenty of skin in the game. Dallaire has pushed forward with multiple volumes based on current research that are against genocide or against the use of children as soldiers. In They Fight Like Soldiers he puts forth the unique idea that children are a ‘weapons system’ rather than mere soldiers. They are a commodity of nearly endless supply that can be used to kill; to provide transport drugs and small arms; to sweep areas where mines are potentially buried as they are heavy enough to set off the mines, but are disposable; and in the case of girls, they can cook, clean, serve as sex slaves and bush wives, and literally give birth to the next generation of child soldiers.

Both are thought-provoking books that force readers to look at the role of children through history and how they have often been marginalized, ill-treated, and considered disposable rather than being the future of humanity.

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All the Glimmering Stars (Lake Union Publishing,  May 7, 2024) is available through:

Your local independent bookseller     |     Amazon     |     Barnes & Noble

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You can read my review of They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers by Lt. General (Ret’d) Roméo Dallaire here.

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