Structure

The book is divided into thirty-one chapters that vary slightly in length. The chapters are identified by number only. The opening chapter details the massacre of 166 people in a refugee camp where Sandra and her family were staying. The next chapter drops back in time to provide background of Sandra's people, including the Banyamulenge tribe, her parents, and how they came to live in the town of Uvira. From there, the book flows in chronological order. In Chapter 8, Sandra picked up the night of the massacre, bringing closure to the opening chapter. In Chapter 1, Sandra saw her mother get shot. The reader does not know for certain until Chapter 9 that Rachel survived, but Deborah was killed.

The author uses traditional structure, including punctuation and formatting. There are words and phrases that she thought or wrote, that she then included in this book, and those appear in italics...