Read by Will Damron
2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pgs.
Adult CRF
Finished 8/15/17
Goodreads Rating: 4.12 - 771 ratings
My rating: 5
Setting: Contemporary Middle East and a short time period 22 years before that....probably Iraq....
First line/s: "Arwood Hobbs was bored. Not your regular bored. Not your casual rainy-day Cat in the Hat-style bored that arrives with the wet, leaving you with nothing to do. It wasn't post-fun or pre-excitement bored, either. It was somehow different."
My comments: This book puts you smack dab in the middle of Iraq, first in 1991 and then in 2013, following the same group of characters as they begin...and then finalize....a huge episode in their lives. This is a modern war story, the story that we see hinted at on the news and in hearing stories of returning soldiers who have been mentally (and physically) wounded. The story wasn't exactly eye-opening, but more illuminating. Every nerve-wracking, frazzled step. What made it especially real for me is all the humor that seeps in. You'd not expect humor, but that's how it maintains its believability, and its humanity.
You can read the plot summary that Goodreads gives. It's the characters, and of course the setting, that set this story apart. It wasn't easy to read. It isn't easy to rate a 5. But it earned it. Mr. Miller is a great writer and storyteller, and the guy who read it (I listened on Audible) did a terrific job.
Goodreads synopsis: From the author of Norwegian by Night, and Short Listed for the 2017 CWA Gold Dagger Award, a novel about two men on a misbegotten quest to save the girl they failed to save decades before.
1991. Near Checkpoint Zulu, one hundred miles from the Kuwaiti border, Thomas Benton meets Arwood Hobbes. Benton is a British journalist who reports from war zones in part to avoid his lackluster marriage and a daughter he loves but cannot connect with; Arwood is a mid-western American private who might be an insufferable ignoramus, or might be a genuine lunatic with a death wish--it's hard to tell.
Desert Storm is over, peace has been declared, but as they argue about whether it makes sense to cross the nearest border in search of an ice cream, they become embroiled in a horrific attack in which a young local girl in a green dress is killed as they are trying to protect her. The two men walk away into their respective lives. But something has cracked for them both.
Twenty-two years later, in another place, in another war, they meet again and are offered an unlikely opportunity to redeem themselves when that same girl in green is found alive and in need of salvation. Or is she?
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