Review by Booklist Review
Baker's beautifully written first novel connects quotidian and global issues through two women, Amira and Mel, living in different hemispheres. Amira is in Rome, and has converted to Islam to feel closer to her husband, Ayoub, who was being held in Morocco for unknown reasons for two years. Upon his release, he struggles to readjust. Amira has to balance helping him with navigating the claustrophobic attention of her well-intentioned adopted community while also serving as the breadwinner. Mel lives in a small North Carolina town. A former activist, she is now a compromising school board member who, though happily married, is nonetheless in a no-strings affair with her political opposite, Bradley, a confident right-wing lawyer. Her life is transformed when old friends inform Mel that a local company in her sleepy town is involved in extraordinary renditions, including the one that captured Ayoub. In a tale that unfurls like a thriller across these two narratives, Baker is subtly indignant about the entire neoconservative project. This assured debut is a timely reminder of the traumas caused by many post-9/11 policies.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Inspired by the North Carolina Stop Torture Now coalition, Baker's arresting debut charts the effects of rendition on an Italian Muslim convert and an American former anti-war activist. Amira, 32, feels like an outcast living in the small Rome apartment she once shared with her Moroccan husband, Ayoub, who was detained in Pakistan, then extradited and tortured for suspicion of unspecified crimes. When Ayoub returns after years of silence except for the redacted letters he sent to Amira, he is not the man Amira once knew, and though an American lawyer is working on his case, the future seems dubious for them both. Running alongside this narrative is the story of Melanie, a real estate agent in North Carolina who is cheating on her husband with Bradley, a member of the local school board. Bradley also happens to be the president of Atlantic Industries, a small Air America--style operation that stands accused of providing rendition flights. Now, Melanie becomes consumed with guilt over her hesitancy to help her old activist friends dig into Bradley's shadowy activities. Baker masterly juggles the two concurrent story lines, never losing the urgency of either as Amira and Melanie grapple with hard truths and seek justice and indemnification. Along the way, the author digs deep into the nuances of love, pain, betrayal, and the promise of deliverance. This moving debut buzzes with relevance. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Amira lives in Rome, where she spends her days trying to read the heavily redacted letters her husband sends from the Moroccan black site where he is imprisoned. Mel lives in suburban North Carolina, where she tries to get her conservative neighbors to support her far-reaching school board initiatives. Their stories come together when Mel discovers that a local charter airline is a CIA front serving various facilities, including the one holding Amira's husband. Baker's fiction and nonfiction pieces have appeared in multiple venues.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
This affecting debut examines the impact of rendition and torture in two different cultures. In one narrative thread, Amira, nee Maria, is an Italian woman married to Ayoub, a Moroccan who was seized by police two years ago while traveling in Pakistan, flown to a prison in his homeland, and apparently tortured, all without being charged. Amira, who changed her name and religion when she married, copes with loneliness, uncertainty, and feeling like an outsider to both Italians and Muslims. She depends on calls and emails from a U.S. lawyer working on such cases and on heavily redacted letters from Ayoub. When he's released, he is thin, anxious, barely able to eat or work or spend time close to Amira. Meanwhile, in a town near Raleigh, North Carolina, Melanie is a real estate agent whose college-age son discovers her extramarital affair with a fellow school board official. Around the same time, roughly 2005, a couple Mel and her husband have known since they were all college activists want help mounting a campaign against a small airline in Mel's town that is being used for rendition flights. Mel hesitates because her lover is the airline's president. Baker, a Chicago-based writer, alternates chapters mainly between the two women, and the resulting diptych is inescapably unbalanced. Mel's troubles can seem almost comically petty compared with Amira's. That may be unavoidable, but it's compounded by the fact that the North Carolina activists had nothing to do with Ayoub's release. Don't read those as flaws. In the real world, too, activism depends on preoccupied, ambivalent people like Mel and sometimes doesn't seem to make a difference. And sometimes it does. An author's note says the book was partly inspired by the work of North Carolina Stop Torture Now. A thoughtful look at the small-scale fallout of an international issue. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.