Amani’s River by David Hartness is a historical fiction novel. Aderito is just 10 years old when he finds himself on the banks of the river in Mozambique. He meets Victoria and the two become good friends, enjoying their childhood together and looking forward to a promising future. All too soon, it comes to an end as both children find themselves embroiled in the violent war that is raging across Mozambique when they are abducted. Forced to train as killers, they turn to each other and try to stay out of the way. Unfortunately, Victoria is growing up and starts to attract the kind of attention she doesn’t want, and Aderito has got the taste of blood and killing. They try to escape and make a life for themselves elsewhere, but will the crisis in Mozambique defeat them? Can they survive when the odds are stacked against them?

Amani’s River by David Hartness is a powerful novel, grounded in true historical fact with a tale woven around them. It’s a gripping story that I was caught up in, not stopping until I had fought the battle alongside Victoria and Aderito. I promise any reader that you will get caught, the same as I did, in a whirlwind of emotion as you make your way through the story. If that was the intention of David Hartness, then he has done his job and done it well. Thoroughly enjoyed this amazing story and I hope there is more where this came from.

Amani’s River by David Hartness is a vivid fictional account of one boy’s heartbreaking journey as a child soldier in Mozambique. Aderito Chirindza’s father uproots his family from the States and takes them to Mozambique to help serve in the hospital there. The country is in the midst of a bitter civil war and innocent civilians are being subjected to brutal raids. These raids often lead to mutilation and death of the people. Aderito is unhappy in his new home, but nothing prepares him for his horrific capture by a rebel group. He, along with a new found friend, Victoria, are forced into terrible conditions and made to fight. Although Aderito tries to protect Victoria, he is finding himself more and more brainwashed by the cause of the rebels and the lust for killing. Will he manage to make it back to his family alive or will the rebel cause consume him?

Mr. Hartness’ novel is not for the faint of heart. I was ill-prepared for the graphic description and account of Aderito’s life as a child soldier. The content shocked me. As a topic little discussed, I was glad to see a book shed light on such atrocities. I felt the entire novel was profoundly moving and heartbreaking at the same time. As hard as it was to read, Mr. Hartness did not sugar-coat the truth in any way. Amani’s River brings to light some very real issues in Africa and makes the reader pause to consider the realities of life for some of these child soldiers.

Amani’s River offers relentless accounts of murder, torture and sadism that make these pages indelible and, at the same time, hard to stomach.

At the age of ten, Aderito has been uprooted, along with his mother, from their home in Houston to accompany Aderito’s father as he returns to his homeland of Mozambique to
serve as what seems to be a medical missionary. Thrust into a strange land and forced to learn a new language, the boy's loneliness is eased by his friendship with Victoria, a girl of about his own age, with whom he soon forms a tight bond. Unfortunately for them, Mozambique is in the midst of a ruthless civil war, which soon sweeps them up, turning
Aderito into a vicious child soldier and Victoria into a sex slave.

From here, the ferociousness is unrelieved. Numbed by heroin, driven by fear, forced into cannibalism, the young man is turned into a killer, ravaging enemies with both AK47
and machete. "I hated the monster inside of me," he declares at one point, and yet eventually he begins to thrive on his imagined power.

After numerous scenes of savagery, the story comes to a head when Victoria has a child by one of her tormentors and futilely tries to escape, while the slaughter around her and
Aderito intensifies. By story’s end, no one has gotten out of the narrative unscathed.


This novel offers a vivid portrait of what happens to children thrust into combat. In a world filled with reports of young boys wearing suicide vests and of kidnapped young girls sold into
slavery, Amani’s River is an instructive, if brutalizing, read.

​~Blue Ink Review~

As a woman I have often been appalled and saddened at how the world sometimes treats my gender and think about how such behaviors might feel to me but I never really thought about the experience of young men and boys who are taken by rebel forces and forced to become "soldiers" for these forces. After reading this book, I shall never be that negligent again.

Aderito Chirindza, the main character of Hartness' book gives a new insight into the cruel and inhumane way these young men are taken, robbed of their innocence and made into killing machines by men who were either indoctrinated into their lives as they are indoctrinating these boys or callous and barely human males whose only calling is death and power. The denigration of the individual to make him dependent upon the captor is nothing new - it has happened time and time again in human history - but the depths these adults sank to in their process is painful for the reader. The investment of the captors is minimal because the captured are used as slaves and treated like no humans should ever be treated - little or no food, ill-fitting clothes if any, no privacy, no chance to grow and mature in a normal way with guidance but thrust into being killers or dying for refusing to become killers.

Aderito was American but his father felt the need to return to Mozambique to help his people when there was civil strife in the country; his father was a doctor who took his family back to their roots to aid in the struggle. Rebel forces raided the villages and kidnapped children to fill their ranks and wreak havoc upon the land keeping the strife ever-present and a daily reality. Aderito and his friend Victoria were taken and she was abused in all of the typical ways a female may be abused - verbally, physically, sexually and spiritually. She had no choice to resist and Aderito could not defend her because he was also a child.

For him the abuse was mental, physical and emotional - his body starved of food, his mind starved of guidance toward a normal teenager's life and his emotions repressed, beaten out of him, while the blood lust and lethality was rewarded and cultured. He killed because he had no choice if he wished to live and he did as he was ordered because he was made to forget what would be considered ethical and lawful by the people who forged him into a killing machine.

He has held all of this sadness inside him and away from his family until he goes back to Mozambique as an adult to scatter his mother's ashes in her homeland. He tells his wife and son what he suffered at the hands of his captors and the way of life he experienced as a teenager.

It is a very emotional story. Hard-hitting and painful but it offers a glimmer of hope that one can come back from such an experience and become strong again for the right reasons. The name of the river is Amani - the Swahili word for hope and the book is a work of hope and a light is shown on the resilience of the human mind and body. Amani - hope.

~Donna F Hammett~

Aderito is a young man on the brink of losing his humanity, yet his is a story of survival through the brutality of life as a child soldier. In David Hartness’s Amani’s River, rebel forces of the Mozambique Resistance Movement abduct ten-year-old Aderito Chirindza and train him to become a child soldier in the Mozambican Civil War. As narrator of this coming-of-age redemption tale told in flashback, Aderito reveals his transformation from an innocent American boy into a
warrior who plunders villages and relishes the life-and-death control he wields over his countless victims.

The novel begins in 2013. Aderito is in his forties and has returned to Mozambique with his wife and son to spread his mother’s ashes. They sit on the bank of a river, and memories of his five years as a child soldier resurface. He tells his wife and son his story.

It’s 1982. Aderito and his immigrant parents, Amani and Michelle, live in Texas. They return to Mozambique to aid friends and family imperiled by the war between the nation’s ruling party (FRELIMO) and opposition forces (RENAMO). Within weeks of their relocation, RENAMO soldiers snatch Aderito and his friend, Victoria. They rape Victoria repeatedly, and the Commander numbs Aderito with heroin and cocaine to get him to slaughter innocents without compunction. Soon the bewildered pair cannot recollect their parents’ faces, and concede that the rebels are the closest thing to family that they have. Not entirely dispirited, though, Aderito and Victoria plan an escape. Its success is compromised, and Aderito must perform a brutal deed as punishment.

The book’s emotional pull gravitates from the heartrending confusion Aderito feels toward the Commander. Aderito believes they share a father-son bond, yet when the commander beats him mercilessly, Aderito laments the savagery that a father can inflict on a son. Aderito’s plaintive ruminations about their sham alliance humanize the cold-blooded slayer he’s become and give the novel a much-needed
reprieve from its graphic narrative.

Any novel about warfare requires a degree of explicitness to
demonstrate humankind’s brutality during combat. In Aderito’s story, it’s especially needed in order to show what befalls children who are recruited into armed conflict and how they are manipulated. Hartness learned about child soldiers when he was a US Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Mozambique. His goal in Amani’s River is to raise awareness, and he delivers a searing and disturbing portrait of this deplorable practice.

Hartness’s harrowing and significant debut succeeds. comparisons to Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier are apt.

~Amy O'Loughlin- Forward Clarion Review~

In this debut novel, a man moves his family to war-torn Mozambique, where his son is kidnapped by rebels and turned into a child soldier.

Ten-year-old Aderito Chirindza and his family have a comfortable existence in Houston, Texas, but then their father moves them to Mozambique, which is in the middle of a violent civil war. There, Aderito meets a young girl named Victoria, and the two of them develop a fast friendship. Their world is shattered when the Mozambique Resistance Movement, known as RENAMO, comes to their village and kidnaps them both in an attempt to turn them into soldiers. The two suffer horrible abuse until, traumatized emotionally and physically, Aderito accepts and embraces the revolutionary movement and Victoria becomes a servant and sex slave. Thereafter, the once sweet and kind boy becomes a remorseless terrorist and killer. Finally, he manages to return home, but the RENAMO troops come looking for him, leading to a devastating confrontation. This is a harrowing story realistically and graphically told by Hartness, who spent time in Mozambique and currently lives in Zambia. His descriptions of homes in Mozambique ring with authenticity—“Pots, pans, plates and dishes rested on the floor, crammed against the far wall”—and he realistically depicts the abject cruelty of the rebel forces, disturbingly capturing their casual disregard for human life. Hartness expertly documents Aderito’s radical change from considerate young man to soulless killer.

A well-told, chilling story of child soldiers in Africa.


​~Kirkus Review~

"I could not put it down if I tried. Living in Zambia right next door to several countries where the same or similar atrocities occur leave an indelible mark upon my soul. For someone who strives with conviction to believe in the hope of humanity, this book sorely tested that conviction, though it did not win out. Well penned David. The story flowed and captivated."

~Cheryl May Burgess~