eleanorfranzen 's review for:

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

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I tried this once before, closer to its release date, because the premise is so irresistible: in the late 1980s, Black FBI agent Marie Mitchell is subcontracted by the CIA for a honeypot mission, seducing and compromising charismatic Thomas Sankara, the Communist leader of Burkina Faso. I was initially stymied by what felt to me like stilted writing and pacing, and put it down. Later I read that the epistolary conceit (the book is supposedly Marie’s journal/letter to her twin sons) fades out halfway through and the book improves. The conceit sort of fades out, but the book does not improve. The writing never gets less awkward and demonstrative; the emotions we’re meant to feel about Marie’s divided loyalties, the complexity of her position as a Black woman in a racist society who nevertheless actively works to uphold and expand American global supremacy, are always told us but never come alive on the page. Nor is her sexual attraction to Sankara, or his powerful political appeal to his own people, convincing; Wilkinson gives us two of his speeches and neither contains more than vague platitudes. I won’t go on about American Spy’s weaknesses—there’s no mileage in doing a hatchet job on this novel, which I think was written in good faith and wasn’t so wildly popular that it feels like a public duty to rip it apart—but this didn’t work for me on any level. A huge shame with a premise so promising. Source: local library #LoveYourLibrary