Rachel Bennett's Reviews > American Spy

I'll start by saying that this book wasn't great. I wanted it to be, but it was not. However, it gets 3 stars for me for some really refreshing originality.

One of the reasons I was so excited to pick this book up in the first place is the unique premise. It's the 1980s, and Marie is a black female FBI agent with a troubled past and big ambition. She's not really getting anywhere in her FBI career and ends up working for the CIA in Africa, trying to de-stabilize an authoritarian, Communist government. What more could I possibly want??

The book opens a bang, with a really intense scene where we see Marie as this amazing fighter, fending off an intruder and protecting her children. Maternal bad-assery? I was immediately hooked and could not wait to find out more about Marie and her work as an agent and spy.

Unfortunately, the character quickly falls apart for me, as we go back in time and see Marie making these wild decisions that aren't really explained. She makes a senseless move that intentionally threatens her career in the FBI, gets involved with the CIA even though she doesn't want to, and makes major, life-changing decisions based on her feelings for someone (supposedly a deep love, although I never saw any proof of that). I guess I felt like the character of Marie was really let down by a lack of real motivation for any of these actions and for the way that her love story makes her a simpering idiot (UGH, a real pet peeve of mine).

The book also had some issues with pacing and narrative drive. The whole novel is framed as journal entries addressed to her twin boys, which was an interesting decision (interesting as in, not one I would have gone with.) The addresses to "you" frequently took me out of the narrative as I was constantly trying to remember who she's actually talking to. If her children played a larger role in the story, maybe it would have made sense, but they were not much beyond this narrative device.

I think most of the issues I'm highlighting are coming from the fact that this was a debut work - I think there is still work to be done by this author, but if she improves her narrative structure and character development, and continues bringing interesting premises like this one to the table, I will certainly be interested in reading what she does next.