Today is a book review day. I realized I read this book and I did mention it on my social media pages but never wrote about it.
Gina Wilkinson has written a gripping historical novel about a time period that even I remember. We were in the throes of legal paperwork to get our family moved from Montreal, Canada to somewhere in the US. Pierre was looking for work, I had given birth to our third child and we were organizing his green card. We watched the events of the US invasion into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein from our living room in Montreal. It was a gripping time.
Gina lived it by being on the front lines in Iraq during this tumultuous period. Her husband was working for UNICEF. Gina, by profession, was a foreign journalist but had to put aside her career identity or else be imprisoned or worse. Instead, she watched and observed what was going on around her. She had an Iraqi friend whom she later discovered worked for the secret police in Iraq (something many were coerced into doing for fear of their lives and the lives of their families). This friendship and the events happening around Iraq would later lead her to write this historical novel.
This book starts out on the precipice of the Iraqi War in 2002. Huda, an Iraqi woman working for the Australian embassy, is forced to become friends with Ally. She is the wife of the Australian embassy but American. Through the friendship that I can see developing, they learn secrets about each other and about family members. There is intrigue and suspense as well as great emotions and turmoil of the soul.
This novel is so well written and although it was the gorgeous cover that pulled me in at first, the story kept me hanging on. You may have figured out by now that I love to read. Historical fiction is my top choice because I love studying history. World War II has much written about it and it was a horrendous time in our world’s history. The wars in the Middle East deserve no less attention as citizens suffered and died for regimes that did not care about them.
I’m looking forward to reading more about this time in history if only to continue to learn about the sacrifices military men and women made as well as the hard working citizens of so many of these countries. You can find the book here and I encourage you to read it.