This book, in a beautiful way, portrays war and postwar lives in the small city of Makeni, Sierra Leone. The reader is led through the conflict by following a number of individuals who have, in one way or another, been complicit in the war. Through their stories, we get not only highly personal insights of the war in Makeni and surroundings, but are also on a meta-level guided through the history of the Sierra Leone civil war. The stories often give us fragments of rebel warfare in the typical way that war is experienced by rebel soldiers and civilians – short snippets of historical events without grasping the whole picture. Catherine Bolten subsequently works towards giving the reader a whole history, not an easy task.

Bolten manages to uncover issues that are often not discussed in the literature on African wars. There is a clear focus on often absent subjects' morality, friendship, and social cohesion in the accounts. A central aspect in the book is how fluid borders are between civilians and soldiers, and how war, albeit troublesome and unwanted, forges close relations between the two categories. Although most civilians never agreed with some of the methods of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, they did not see the rebels simply as atrocious invaders as often suggested; they at times agreed with the goals, yet clearly not the methods, of the rebels. Here it is important to point out that war creates relations in novel ways. It is also refreshing to see accounts pinpointing how gender relations, at times, are turned on their head. Chapter Four is perhaps particularly instructive, as a young man is describing how he is completely powerless in his relationship with a young woman active within the rebel faction. Chapter Five is equally interesting as we follow a market woman who in many ways creates her success due to the war – naturally, her life also highlights all the negative issues. The crucial point is that it is not gender per se that makes you powerless but it is your connections with the rebel group. A final issue worth highlighting concerns the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) process; Bolten points out that it did not succeed beyond taking the guns from the fighters as military structures and loyalties continued to exist.

There are some inevitable problems in basing a book on narratives. First, is Makeni poorer than other Sierra Leonean cities? Indeed, during the latter part of the war, the city was particularly targeted due to the fact that it was the main rebel base. But is Makeni especially bad off today? I visited Makeni for the first time in 1992 and, at that time, it was not worse off than other places in Sierra Leone. Traversing the country in the postwar period does not give that impression either. My conclusion would rather be that the image of Makeni as especially impoverished or stricken is an outcome of relying too much on the narratives. Secondly, narratives do not just create victims, but also heroes. This is particularly clear in Chapter Two, with its narrative of an army soldier. He and other soldiers are the heroes. I am not denying that these soldiers were at times heroes, but it is problematic to rely so heavily on this narrative and not sufficiently relate it to alternative accounts, including other written sources. It is also quite clear in this chapter that some of the narrated events are at odds with the chronology of the war. On the other hand, one must appreciate how truthful Bolten remains to the narrated accounts.

When I saw the title of the book, I thought that someone had finally focused on the issue of love in Sierra Leone. However, love is, according to Bolten, a Krio (the lingua franca of Sierra Leone) term ‘expressing the bonds of mutual identification, sacrifice, and need between individuals and groups of people’ (p. 2). Certainly Bolten does not give sufficient attention to this key term in the book, but I also question whether this expression is correctly used. ‘Love’ in Krio could indeed be used in such a manner, but it is far from exclusively used so. It does not just work as the emic concept intended. But love in Sierra Leone? Bolten has left that to somebody else to write about.