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noah_hurts 's review for:
American Spy
by Lauren Wilkinson
Three stars but a low three. There’s a lot going on here and I enjoyed the tension of some of it, but I didn’t love the historical fiction aspects as much as I thought I would.
I think I get what the author was going for in regards to comparisons between being a secret agent, being a Black woman in a white-male-dominated space and a Black American in Africa, but some of the elements that brushed up against ideology just felt half-baked. We get the protag’s perspective on things in a way that felt like the author speaking through her protagonist.
Why choose Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso as your setting, and include Sankara as a core part of the story, without really being interested in doing much more than surface level exploration of the political themes and American imperialism? It all felt like it came back to individuals rather than the more insidious (or altruistic, I suppose) forces they represented.
Meh, not blown away. It was alright.
I think I get what the author was going for in regards to comparisons between being a secret agent, being a Black woman in a white-male-dominated space and a Black American in Africa, but some of the elements that brushed up against ideology just felt half-baked. We get the protag’s perspective on things in a way that felt like the author speaking through her protagonist.
Why choose Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso as your setting, and include Sankara as a core part of the story, without really being interested in doing much more than surface level exploration of the political themes and American imperialism? It all felt like it came back to individuals rather than the more insidious (or altruistic, I suppose) forces they represented.
Meh, not blown away. It was alright.