American Spy in Reading with Style

Jun 14, 2019 Megan added it

Shelves: historical-fiction, fiction

A meditative family story, in which espionage gets Marie no closer to fully understanding the sister she loved and now mourns:

In one column she was the cheerleader and the girl who grew up making me dinner and checking my homework. In the other she was the boxer, the girl who beat up Rhonda. And then there was a third column: she was the woman who sent me genial, not fully interpretable letters from Long Binh. That was Helene: putting together a puzzle, getting it all finished, then finding a le

A meditative family story, in which espionage gets Marie no closer to fully understanding the sister she loved and now mourns:

In one column she was the cheerleader and the girl who grew up making me dinner and checking my homework. In the other she was the boxer, the girl who beat up Rhonda. And then there was a third column: she was the woman who sent me genial, not fully interpretable letters from Long Binh. That was Helene: putting together a puzzle, getting it all finished, then finding a leftover piece in the box.

I always suspected there was a theory of her personality that nicely accommodated the elements I thought were contradictory. And that was who she really was. But I never learned the theory. I never saw that person, and even now, twenty years later, thinking about that is enough to make me want to cry.

American Spy is written in the format of a letter/journal, from Marie to her young twin sons. She starts writing it after the three of them leave the United States to the safety of her mother's farm on Martinique, after a home intruder turns out to be an assassin sent to kill Marie. Marie's life is full of unfinished business, and knowing she'll soon be on a mission to finish said business--one she might not return from--she writes an explanation of her life, of her love, to her sons.

This isn't a plotty, suspenseful novel, even if it opens with, you know, the whole nighttime assassin scene. This is about Marie and her late sister, and the choices they made, and what brought Marie to become an FBI agent, to get involved in the CIA's Cold War destabilization of communism in Africa. I found it engrossing and compelling, even if complicated Marie has no easy answers to anything. The love affair wasn't as weak as I was expecting it to be, but it wasn't as interesting to me as Marie's professional career or her relationships with her sister, with her parents, with Robbie. I am a little twitchy about fictionalized versions of so-very-recent historical figures (yes, I'm counting the 80s as so-very-recent--some of these people are still alive!), too, which kept me unpleasantly tense reading through Marie's relationship with Thomas Sankara.

I loved the (view spoiler) ending. :) ...more

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Aug 20, 2019 Joanna rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, passport, 2019-read, rws-2019-summer

The narrator for the audiobook did a great job with a really difficult (and, basically annoying) narrative voice, wherein the author is writing a journal for her two sons. The sons are addressed as "you" and sometimes by name (e.g., "you, Tommy, were crying"). This felt like an author who couldn't figure out how to get the book started, so decided on a weird framing to justify the novel. The book was interesting enough to stand on its own without this framing, and would have been better without ...more

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