Kira

I went into this book with high expectations, hoping to get caught up in a story of a young girl experiencing the mandatory two years of military service required of both men and women in Israel. Prior to reading the synopsis I didn't even know that went on. I do not know much about life in modern-day Israel and was looking forward to learning more, especially after loving other books set in the middle east, such as A Thousand Splendid Suns.Unfortunately, I struggled through half of this book and set it down, and never felt the need to pick it back up again. I just didn't care enough to find out what happened. It's not that it wasn't well-written, because parts of it were, the beginning in particular. But the overall feeling of the book was muddled and apathetic. To start with, it's not the story of one girl but of three, with each chapter being told from a different girl's point of view, always in the first person. This was confusing, especially when I didn't realize a third girl had taken a turn narrating until halfway through the chapter. There's also the fact that the books starts out just before the girls enlist, and then it abruptly skips ahead through their training and they are suddenly jaded soldiers overseeing new recruits. I was not able to like the girls, or understand the motivation for their actions, so I was not able to really care about what happened to them.There are too many books in my queue to spend time reading books that don't move me, or teach me, or give me a brief respite from everyday life, and that is why I just can't continue with The People of Forever are Not Afraid. With a title like that, I really wanted to know... why aren't they afraid? I guess I'll never know.