Son of a Gun

Son of a Gun (2012) is a young adult novel by Dutch author and diversity advocate Anne de Graaf, first published in Dutch in 2006. Set during the Liberian civil war, the novel follows 10-year-old Nopi and her younger brother, Lucky, as they are captured by rebels and forced to serve as child soldiers. An academic specialist in the difficulties facing young people in post-conflict situations, de Graaf wrote Son of a Gun to introduce middle-school readers in the developed world to the reality faced by child soldiers.

The book opens with a prologue, set in the present day. Lucky narrates the process of turning in his AK-47 to the United Nations’ gun buyback program. As a child soldier, he has been taught to view the gun as his “God,” to listen to its voice and let it direct him. As the gun tumbles down a pile of returned weapons, Lucky hopes that he won’t “hear no more voices.”

The next chapter is narrated by Nopi (the two protagonists alternate throughout). She takes us back to the day her childhood ended. She and Lucky were at a school meeting. Rebel forces in the area had scouted the school’s routine, and they knew that during these regular meetings the children were virtually unguarded. As Lucky and his best friend, James, squabbled about soccer teams, soldiers swept down on the school, abducting all of them. Nopi addresses the reader to explain that she later learned that “this happens a lot.”



At the soldiers’ camp, the children are tied up, drugged, and beaten until they are utterly compliant. One boy tries to resist, and a rebel officer shoots him dead on the spot.

The boys are separated from the girls, and all the children are armed with AK-47s and given the rudiments of training. They don’t need more than that, because they are not expected to survive. When a battle is joined, the children are sent forward to perform the tasks adults won’t. They serve as decoys to trigger mines or to draw enemy fire.

Soon the children realize how they are being used, and they try to run away or failing that, to drop back so at least they won’t be first in the firing line. Their captors subject them to brutal beatings. When it is Lucky’s turn to be beaten, Nopi comes to his defense. She is beaten so badly, she loses her hearing. Fearing what might happen to her if her deafness is discovered, she keeps it a secret from everyone except Lucky, and the two of them painstakingly improvise a form of sign language.



A group of children, including Nopi, Lucky, and Lucky’s friend James, plot an escape. When the time comes, the three of them are among those who manage to get away, and they hurry back to their village. When they get there, however, they find the place abandoned, their homes burned to the ground.

Lucky and Nopi set off for their grandparents’ house in the city of Monrovia, where they find to their relief that their parents are alive. Their happiness is short-lived. Government soldiers march both parents and grandparents to the diamond mines, and Lucky and Nopi are left alone once again.

Soon soldiers are looting the neighborhood’s houses at will. Lucky hides Nopi, and when the soldiers reach their home, he tells them he is alone. The soldiers decide to take over the house, at least until the food is exhausted. As they sleep, Lucky retrieves Nopi from her hiding place and the two of them flee the city.



Not knowing where their parents and grandparents have been taken, they wander aimlessly. After a long day’s walk, they spend the night in a tree, waking to find two parties of child soldiers fighting around them. Lucky and Nopi try to escape, but in the melee, they are separated and both are captured.

Lucky is captured by a government general known as “Peanut Butter,” who recruits Lucky as a soldier. Now entirely alone and despairing of his sister’s fate, Lucky abandons himself to soldierly nihilism, gradually becoming hardened to combat and suffering.

Meanwhile, Nopi is captured by the rebel forces, and gifted to a rebel colonel as a “third wife.” Subjected to coercive sex, Nopi makes her escape, managing to join a party of people sailing a makeshift boat to a refugee camp, where to her amazement, she finds her parents.



After five years of war and bloodshed, Lucky has absorbed the ideology of the conflict, believing that the rebels are his enemy. Then, in battle, he comes face-to-face with his old friend James, fighting on the rebel side. Realizing that his life as a soldier is empty, he too runs away, finally tracking his family down in their refugee camp.

The novel ends by returning to the present moment of the prologue. Lucky turns in his gun. As he has wanted all this time, he will be going back to school. An epilogue includes some historical information about Liberia and its civil war, including photographs.