The King's Rifle

October 20, 2008
One of the young African men in this WWII novel is so proud of his new military boots that he hangs them by the laces around his neck and starts a fashion trend in his village, providing one of many powerful and poignant images that fill Bandele's distinctive first novel. The story chronicles the Chindits, a band of African soldiers enlisted by the British military and sent to Burma to fight the Japanese. Among them is Farabiti Banana, a 14-year-old Nigerian who becomes a soldier to follow the lead of his friends and hopes the military will make him a man. Once out of training, life becomes increasingly dangerous for Banana and his eight fellow Chindits, and by the novel's climax, he's become a man, but at a great cost. Bandele favors a straight-ahead style fueled by imagery and wordplay, and his perspective on heavily traveled literary territory is refreshing and even endearing.

August 1, 2009
Adult/High School-For advanced teen readers with an appreciation of history, "The King's Rifle" pulls back the curtain on a theater of World War II long neglected by historians and writers alike, Burma (now called Myanmar). What Bandele reveals is a vivid, brutal, surreal, sometimes funny, tangled world described in language that can be as beautiful and mysterious as the Burmese jungle. This is not a book to be lightly undertaken, as characters have multiple names and complex backgrounds, and speak in dialects. Ali Banana is the Nigerian protagonist who is 17]no, 16]no, 13, actually, as he confesses when pressed by his new commanding officer. He is a boy in the man's world of the Chindits, the rapid-reaction groups formed by the British Army to rattle the Japanese by beating them at their own specialty of jungle warfare. Ali accepts the "invitation" of "Kingi Joji of Ingila"King George of Englandto fight in "Boma." He is told that "wanting to be a man is no sin" and that "killing men does not make a man of you," but in the end, when he must do his comrade one last great favor, he looks like a man of 50. A sophisticated, evocative, and haunting coming-of-age story."Kate Dunlop Seamans, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH"

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