The Best Soldier's Wife

by Katrin Horowitz

The Best Soldier's Wife is the deeply personal story of one woman trying to cope with the shocks and aftershocks of Canada’s war in Afghanistan, told in a series of letters from a military wife in Victoria to the wife of a fictionalized Chief of Defense Staff. In her letters she uses a number of real events to ground her story in the nitty-gritty of the actual war as it unfolded. Each letter ends with a list of the real soldiers who died during the course of her story.

This past spring, Best Soldier's Wife was shortlisted in The Great BC Novel Contest.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Joy Huebert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Best Soldier's Wife took me on a heartfelt journey to the harrowing world of a military family whose husband and father has chosen deployment to a dangerous war zone.  Powerlessness over her husband's situation leads the military wife Amy to begin a series of letters to Mrs. Harker wife of General Harker, the Canadian Chief of Defense.   What does it mean to be at home afraid for a loved one in a dangerous war?  To be mother of a teenage son who hates his father's choice?  To be faced with the consequences of trauma when the soldier returns home?   The Best Soldier's Wife is a novel for our time, that speaks for all when it presents the story of one woman's experience.

[Andrew Croll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. Both a detailed description of the War in Afghanistan and action in Kandahar province, and the life of the wife and son left behind. It's serious, funny, real. And it's well written.

Every military family should read this book. And any family with a loved one suffering from PTSD should read this book.

I couldn't put it down.

[Anita · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Best Soldier’s Wife, by Katrin Horowitz
I was surprised into reading The Best Soldier’s Wife by a random comment from a friend, and found myself quickly passing from a distant, minimal appreciation of the narrator’s voice (too limiting a perspective, I feared) to a much wider and surprising consideration of Canada‘s ‘yes’ to military intervention in Afghanistan, and the devastating effect on Canadian soldiers of the inevitable explosive deaths of their companions.
The development of a savage response by Canadians, especially after the ramp rituals held before sending soldiers’ bodies home, was horrifyingly comprehensible.
The up close depiction of a ‘nice guy’ who becomes a howling shell of himself, and the family that tries to hold and heal him in their comfort zone, and fails, was sobering.
Thus this humble series of unsent letters to her husband‘s commanding officer’s wife becomes freighted with the agony of war upon humans trying to do the right thing, and lead their lives.
I wasn’t expecting this book (by a friend) to assume such large proportions in the agonised conversation about war.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

After taking a writing workshop with author Katrin Horowitz, I wanted to read this book about the life of a Canadian military wife dealing with her husband's absences after volunteering in Afghanistan and the subsequent tensions with their teenaged son. I enjoyed its setting of Victoria, BC, and descriptions of the city. I also appreciated the challenges of being a military wife as the main character describes the neighborhood full of military wives:

I felt like I was back in high school, forced to hang out with the boring girls and wondering if I would ever be part of something more interesting.

...I wanted civilian friends, women who were part of a bigger world, women who were interested in novels and poetry, politics and philosophy, women who weren't Traci-women who didn't remind me of my own impossible, petty problems.