A Voice That Fought to Come Out

There were, to put it mildly, some ups and downs.

When he started out, Iweala says, he was trying to tell Agu's story in the third person. This turned out not to work: It was too distant, and made the violent scenes feel voyeuristic. At one point, totally frustrated, he decided to write a completely new book, from the point of view of a woman who worked with child soldiers. Kincaid steered him back to his original idea.

One day he brought her something in a first-person voice not unlike the one in the finished book. (Though the setting is not Nigeria, Agu speaks in an invented patois derived in part from the way Nigerians speak English.) Kincaid approved. She said something like "Okay, this is good, but why don't you try to revise it and fine-tune it a little bit," Iweala recalls.

Excited, he went wildly overboard. He wrote for 48 hours straight, chopping up the section he'd showed Kincaid, restructuring it, changing the cadence. His bemused roommates started filming him, "so there's this tape of me standing up talking to myself, like in a high-pitched voice, just trying to get this right." When he finished, he jumped in the shower, then dashed off to see his adviser.

Who read three pages and stopped.

"When I said revise it, I didn't mean do this to it," she said. "Go back!"

He was as dejected as he'd ever been, he says, but he'd reached a turning point. Kincaid's reaction gave him confidence in the original voice he'd tried.

He kept writing.

While he'd been struggling with the voice, he'd been doing a different kind of work, as well. He read everything he could find about children at war, reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and books such as "First They Killed My Father," about a Cambodian child soldier. And he signed on to work with Theresa Betancourt, a Boston University researcher studying former child soldiers in Sierra Leone.

One late question had been whether to keep a death scene he feared might be too melodramatic. He was cheered when his father later told him, "Wow. You really got me there." He also worried about the ending: He wanted to show the horrors Agu had gone through, but also that not everything was lost.

Iweala finished his thesis two days early, then carried a copy with him everywhere, fearful that his residence would burn down.

He sent a copy of the manuscript to Powell. His old teacher was astonished. "It was incredible," she says. "I found it so profound, so mature. . . .