American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

 

I listened to the audiobook version of American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson and read by Bahni Turpin. The framing structure of this book is that Marie Mitchell is telling her life story to her twin sons in letter format. She was an intelligence officer in the FBI, but was having some career difficulties as a black woman in the bureaucracy in the height of the Cold War. She's grieving the mysterious death of her sister as she's recruited by the CIA to do undercover work on a mission undermining the government of the dictator Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. We know Marie makes it out alive to write this letter to her sons, but will she make it out to raise them to adulthood?

I thought this was going to be a high-paced kind of romp with double-crossing wheeling and dealing and complicated plot and instead it was a reflective inner searching for Marie to try and convince her sons that she loved them and did everything for them. It was a tiny bit disappointing to that end, but if you're into the idea of reading about into the mind of a person who admits she is not even honest about her emotions to herself, this might be interesting to you. If you're looking for an intense spy thriller, this will not scratch that itch.

There's a big scene to start the book and I sort of thought the rest of the book would be like that, but it really isn't. It's slower and more internal than I anticipated. The ending is full of loose threads and I was unsure if it was the beginning of a series, but Wilkinson hasn't followed up on it yet, so who knows where it's going?

I listened to this instead of reading it because the audiobook was available immediately and I found the narrator to be an interesting choice. I'm sure she was chosen because there's a fair amount of French in the novel, what with trips to Martinique and Burkina Faso, but there were times when her diction would abruptly change tone in the middle of a sentence and I found it jarring. I do wonder if my opinion of this book would be different if someone else had read it.

The good: Representation of black women in intelligence, great dog character, interesting Cold War history since this story is apparently loosely based on true events

The bad: Strange choices made by a spy (would a spy write all this down, really? do that thing that she does with her target?), slow pace, audiobook narrator not awesome

Overall: I'd probably loosely recommend this if you're interested in historical fiction about the Cold War, but not necessarily as a thriller. 

3/5 stars

Stuff I Looked Up:

Can you just take a dog from the US to Martinique with little planning? Yes, pretty much, as long as your dog is vaccinated against rabies and has a microchip. Maybe I should take Hannah on a beach vacation.

Thomas Sankara - He was the President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987 when he was assassinated. The coup and assassination were depicted in the novel, right down to Sankara's widow and two children fleeing the country to his bullet-riddled body being discovered in an unmarked grave.

Blaise Compaore - Former friend of Sankara, he led the coup against Sankara and took over the presidency from 1987 until 2014, winning elections that were held in not great circumstances. 

Ouagadougou - The capital of Burkina Faso. Because I listened to this, I really just wanted to know how to spell it.