IraqiGirl. IraqiGirl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq. Haymarket Books, 2009.

I feel that I have been sleeping all my life and I have woken up and opened my eyes to the world. A beautiful world! But impossible to live in.These are the words of fteen- year-old Hadiya, blogging from the city of Mosul, Iraq, to let the world know what life is really like as the military occupation of her country unfolds. In many ways, her life is familiar. She worries about exams and enjoys watching Friends during the rare hours that the electricity in her neighborhood is running. But the horrors of war surround her everywhere—weeklong curfews, relatives killed, and friends whose families are forced to flee their homes. With black humor and un inching honesty, Hadiya shares the painful stories of lives changed forever.

Marsden, Carolyn. The White Zone. Carolrhoda Books, 2014.

Nouri and his cousin Talib can only vaguely remember a time before tanks rumbled over the streets of their Baghdad neighborhood—when books, not bombs, ruled Mutanabbi Street. War has been the backdrop of their young lives. And now Iraq isn’t just at war with Americans. It’s at war with itself. Sunnis fight Shiites, and the strife is at the boys’ doorsteps. Nouri is Shiite and Talib is half Sunni. To the boys, it seems like only a miracle can mend the rift that is tearing a country and a family apart.

Myers, Walter Dean. Sunrise over Fallujah. Scholastic, 2010.

Robin ‘Birdy’ Perry, a new army recruit from Harlem, isn’t quite sure why he joined the army, but he’s sure where he’s headed: Iraq. Birdy and the others in the Civilian Affairs Battalion are supposed to help secure and stabilize the country and successfully interact with the Iraqi people. Officially, the code name for their maneuvers is Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the young men and women in the CA unit have a simpler name for it: WAR.