Aicha
Soraya Bouazzaoui
Trade Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 978-0316582018
Orbit, March 2026, 352 pages

Hey, everyone. I’m going to dispense with my usual cheerful greeting and mini-summary, because shit’s bad right now. It’s real bad.

For those unfamiliar with the review process, I turn my reviews in a month beforehand (my editor is probably going to point out that I’m frequently late, and it’s more like three weeks beforehand), which means you’re going to read this in April’s issue.

If I had turned this review in when it was due, back in the ending days of February, you’d be reading an entirely different article.

Unfortunately, I’m writing this *after* the inflection point.

I don’t know where America (because this is an American publication), where the world, where all of us will be a month from now. When I started reading Aicha, it was a story that drew searing parallels to what was happening in Gaza and Palestine, the horrors of another colonization unfolding before our interconnected eyes, despite not being written as an explicit comparison.

Then America, my country, a political and global hegemony taught in schools when I was growing up as the epitome of freedom and democracy (currently derogatory), attacked Iran, for reasons that our current regime is still struggling to explain (it’s because a rotting, dementia-addled billionaire pedophile decided to make his problems a global catastrophe).

We dropped bombs on a school for girls, not once, but twice, killing over one hundred and eighty people, the vast majority of them children struggling towards a better future. We attacked a country for no other reason than because we were powerful and we could; the worst among us were allowed to wield the sword of life and death for no other reason than we got bored in our decadence.

Reading this book fucking hurt, because it is a story that has been told before, across a hundred different cultures, across thousands of years, yet here we are again. The colonists and their billionaire backers tromp in with their guns and their swords and their bombs and their knives, and the people just trying to live in peace in the place they’ve always lived are the ones who suffer.

Aicha, the titular character of the book, is all of us right now, every single person who cares about their community, who cares about fighting back against the murderous rulers of their particular citadel, who just wants to be left alone to live their fucking lives, but that isn’t an option available, so the only recourse is to fight back, regardless of the cost.

And that’s why you should read Aicha. Humanity always fights back against tyrants. It’s how we dethroned kings, how we built a better world even when it seemed impossible to imagine that future, how we come together in the face of our current darkness and recognize that even if not all of us make it to the other side, it’s worth the sacrifice.

It’s worth our lives.

That’s what this book is about. That’s why we need to remind each other to never forget the importance of being human: That we love, we care, we lose those we care about, but that we will never allow it to drive us into despair. That every inequity heaped upon us will be repaid a thousandfold upon the heads of those who attempted subjugation.

We’re all in this together.