Expanding the literary limits - and not only - of the intelligence enterprise, by including women of colour is an extraordinary step forward, therefore I was more than interested in discovering the debut novel of Lauren Wilkinson, the much appreciated American Spy.
A single mother of twins, Marie Mitchell is writing a letter to her sons, a first person personal account that extends to some three hundred pages. Prompted by an intruder who was about to kill her, she is bringing her children to Martinique, getting ready to leave them to her parents, before heading to fix some unsolved issues from her (CIA) past. An FBI and once CIA operative, Marie was inspired to a life of spy by her late sister, but also follows a family line of public servants in various state security related positions. The long letter to her twins is an account of her life and decisions, sharing details about their father, the president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, a revolutionary marxist killed in a coup (a real fact).
The timeline is the very end of the Cold War, a period of interest for me, and the tensions and game of pawns between the Soviet Union and the USA are accurate. However, if I would have been interested in such a topic from the ´nonfictional´ point of view, I do have my own academic references in this respect. Because, unfortunately, perhaps trying to follow the facts and the overwhelming amount of information, the book is informative, without a relevant plot development. Hundreds of pages of monologues and first person account, monotously told, for hundreds and hundreds of pages.
My only interest for the book was due to the German translation - made by a group of translators - which made the book an useful resource for anyone looking to improve the language skills. Otherwise, I would have feel guitly either for not finishing the book - which I generally don´t like - or to feel like I was wasting my time. In any case, I did my best trying to get along with this book until the very end, but unfortunately, just didn´t work for me.
Rating: 2.5 stars
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