Drone Child (paperback): A Novel of War, Family, and Survival
by David H. Rothman

“Verdict: Share this action-packed, sensitively rendered audio with fans of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone or Emmanuel Jai’s War Child.” —Library Journal

Beware! Drone Child is not the usual military novel fixated on weapons and military strategy. It’s scarier—it’s about family and love in a violent, chaotic society, and the terror you feel when khaki-clad thugs imperil your dearest ones.

Drone Child breaks all the rules for Thriller 101. Right away, you learn of the happy ending, so you’ll stick around and keep rooting for the witty, likable hero.

Kidnapped for his brilliance, this 15-year-old tech genius must fly deadly drones and fight as a sea-going pirate to keep his parents alive. Can he escape and also free his twin sister in time from the clutches of a major sex-trafficker?

Earlier he worked as a self-taught Internet expert in the mega-city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while his songbird sister aspired to be a rumba star. But murderous gun-worshippers chloroformed him and whisked him away. Now he must fight for the wrong side.

The crazies know exactly where his parents and dog live. The leader of his captors, the thuggish Congolese Purification Army, is a seven-foot-tall whack-job handy with AK-47s and oversized machete blades.

Drone Child: A Novel of War, Family, and Survival offers a gripping, inspirational story for mature young adults and older readers. It’s told as Lemba Adula’s war memoir looking back on his life as a child soldier and pirate some 25 years earlier in the 2020s.

The novel now includes a colorful new cover and provocative discussion questions for book clubs, libraries, and schools—prepared with help from Karen Heilman, M.Ed., and the book’s two Congolese fact-checks and critiquers.

One was Junior Boweya, a translator, software localization expert, and businessman. The other was Jean Felix Mwema Ngandu, a former Mandela Fellow and a leading civic activist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Read less