With the exception of some snippets taking place in some of the characters' childhoods, this book primarily spans a few years around the late 2050's and the early 2060's. At this time, Adrian Hall is the acting Director of the ATF, having recently been promoted from the head of the department in Louisville, KY. Her primary focus is that of a growing militant group within the United States called the Civil Union, whose own origin is from Adrian's neck of the woods.
The Civil Union is the answer to a growing unrest in the increased use of androids in the workforce. As factories replace humans with these machines, more and more people find themselves without a job. It isn't surprising that the rhetoric of one Eli Whitaker would be the voice that tens of thousands of people decide to stand behind. After all, his decade or so of manifestos have been making their way around the United States and his hatred of androids seems to resonate with those who have been displaced by their existence.
Unfortunately, the Civil Union isn't an easy rot to dig out. Its lack of central organization and the way its cells have embedded themselves into small communities around Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia make it a force the ATF has been tackling for months with very little actual headway. To make matters worse, Whitaker has been using his influence to radicalize children and using them not only as shields housed in the various compounds throughout Appalachia, but also as soldiers armed and ready to "fight the feds."
Each mission to take down a Civil Union cell is rife with danger, not only because of the potential harm to ATF agents, but because of the chance that one of the young radicalized hostages could get killed. So it isn't all that unexpected when it actually happens. What's worse, one of the ATF's pilot AS's (Artificial Soldiers) is the one to kill the child. This android, codenamed Ora, does so in order to save agent Trey Caudill, the current head of the Louisville office, but the public backlash against the ATF is palpable.
While Adrian attempts to navigate the political waters surrounding the agency's hunt for Whitaker, Caudill himself struggles with his own feelings regarding the raid that ended that child's life. He has his own views on androids, and especially armed androids like the AS's he has under his command, but he also has his own personal issues with Whitaker, Trey's adopted father. On top of that, Adrian has her own connections as she grew up near Trey and Whitaker and the two of them were, essentially, Whitaker's first attempts to train and radicalize kids. Both escaped Eli's hold before he became the man he is today, but they both recognize the seeds of the man who would one day form the Civil Union.
While Adrian, Trey and Eli are the central moving pieces of Mechanize My Hands to War, this book also focuses on a few other characters. For one, you get to know the AS Ora, as well as another AS under Trey's command, Helios. The reader will also follow, however briefly, one of Eli's young soldiers, a girl named Lia. The story will even take a little detour and follow a small farm that is suffering from poison put in the ground due to bad seed. The couple is forced to take on a pair of androids, one to care for the ailing wife and the other to work the toxic earth.
If this story at all interests you, then Mechanize My Hands to War might very well be a good book to pick up. I found the characters interesting and I even enjoyed the chapters that were from the android's perspectives, but the way that Wagner tells her story might turn off some readers. Instead of telling the story of the ATF's hunt for Eli and the various important missions that lead to the book's conclusion sequentially, with maybe a few flashbacks to shake things up, Mechanize My Hands to War has a chapter for each character and that chapter tells all (or most) of the book's story from their perspective. The result is that each chapter almost feels like a short story in its own right, as you see the events of the book play out through their eyes, except that none of these chapters feel like a complete story, so that aspect isn't quite as satisfying as I would have liked.
With the exception of Adrian and Trey each getting two chapters to help bookend the story as a whole, you get a deep dive into the likes of Ernst and Shay (the farming couple), Helios, Ora, the young soldier Lia, androids Sarah and AG15 (those aforementioned farmhands) and even a chapter for Eli Whitaker himself. Each chapter gives an interesting perspective of the story as a whole in order to build a complete picture. To help manage the narrative, each chapter is subdivided into smaller chapters as it skips through the timeline of the book. This approach helps keep the reader aware of when the various events are happening and helps put together the overall picture of the book.
I will say, this isn't the first piece of media I've consumed that tells its story in this fashion. One movie that comes to mind is 2008's Vantage Point, and it handles this approach pretty well (for most of the film anyway). I've seen this done in some episodes of TV shows and it is often done well in those small segments. I would even argue that Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis (the book, not the movie) does this to tell the story of a secondary character that is never one of the book's primary POV's. As for Mechanize My Hands to War, when I was done reading it, I couldn't help feeling like the story that Wagner was telling didn't benefit a whole lot from this approach. Usually when I see this style, it's to help show each character's perspective of the events but it isn't until you get all of the pieces in front of you that you realize a bigger picture. That wasn't so much the case here and while I still very much enjoyed this book, I don't know that the choppy nature of the narrative made up for the attempt to try something different.
I will say, I think Mechanize My Hands to War is worth the read if you are at all interested in this story. I just want to make sure any potential reader knows what they are getting into when they first open this book up. The fact that it tells the story in a nonlinear fashion isn't quite so obvious, or at least it isn't obvious what the back of the book means by that blurb until you are at least a couple of perspectives deep.
