Beasts of No Nation is overrated. Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel describes the harrowing experiences of a West African boy named Agu, who is forced to become a child soldier. But in place of a substantive plot and humanistic character development, Beasts of No Nation relies on Agu’s loss of innocence to carry the novel. He constantly reminisces about his childhood, which appears frequently in his dreams. The theme of loss of innocence is obvious, given Agu’s experiences of killing, rape, plundering villages, and constant hunger throughout the war. However, the novel offers little else.

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Readers receive almost no meaningful insight into Agu’s character. He’s painted merely as a child who’s been snatched from his village and still holds onto his boyhood dreams. Nothing distinguishes Agu from thousands of other child soldiers whose childhoods are taken away from them. Agu may have been created as a caricature of a child soldier, but for a narrative purpose, this evokes little feeling from readers. The descriptions of his circumstances are insufficient to elicit strong feelings about what should be an inflammatory, evocative topic. He offers only vague sentiments about his new life, such as “This war change us forever, and we never go back to who we was.”

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Agu’s character has little depth; he’s not necessarily someone you can root for or relate to on a human level. Without a meaningful sense of shared humanity from Agu, the reader is left with a profound emptiness, like the novel hasn’t lived up to its full potential.

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If you’re looking for a character with more emotional specificity, read Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone instead. The memoir is a firsthand account of Beah’s time as a child soldier in the 1990s. Where Beasts of No Nation is nebulous and lacking emotion, A Long Way Gone is specific and emotionally-charged. Beah not only describes his experiences of war, but also dives into his feelings and reactions to particular events. Iweala simply narrates Agu’s memories of his past; Beah paints vivid pictures of longing for home. The story makes you feel for Beah's character and root for his eventual escape from the situation. Beah also dives into another layer that Iweala misses entirely–reintegration from war into regular society.

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Beasts of No Nation has a promising premise, but the fact that it tells more than it shows makes it ultimately fall short. If you want to truly be moved by a bona fide account of the horrors of child soldiers, read A Long Way Gone. There might not be a movie version, but it’s not like Beasts of No Nation deserved one. And for what it’s worth, even though it wasn’t that good, the book was better than the movie.