The Shadow King by Maaza Mengisteis an epic and character-driven story about the local Ethiopian population's resistance to the Italian invasion in the 1930s.

Written from multiple points of view and using unique chapter breaks like photo descriptions and interludes, it mainly highlights the women who joined this war as soldiers, nurses, cooks, and spies, and a Jewish-Italian soldier prosecuted by his own government amid his serving said government abroad.

This is an incredibly heavy book, and if reading about sexual and physical abuse triggers you, I advise you to stay away from this one. But it's also beautiful and poetic, perhaps even more so when considering that Ethiopia is the only African nation that was never colonized by foreign invaders.

It does not depict a black and white version of war. The author humanizes and dehumanizes each and every character from one page to the next. There are no atonements, though characters try hard to find silver linings to all the violence. It's an honest book about war, about its dichotomies and hypocrisies. It's the story of the shadows at the center of history.