The Red Daughter and American Spy

Greetings, how is everyone’s May going? It’s been a pretty rainy one here lately, which has sort of helped out my reading truth-be-told. But we’ve been trying to get ready for the annual Golden Triangle three-day bike ride this coming weekend in the mountains, so hopefully the sun will come out. Cross your fingers. Last weekend we faced clouds like these at left. Sometimes when you’re on a bicycle amid the countryside such dark clouds can be rather intimidating but then you must press on to try and finish your ride and get back to shelter. Luckily the skies held for us that day. Below I’ve attached a sunnier’s day photo, which is our goal for bike riding from now on. 

For those going to next week’s BookExpo America in New York, have a great time! Apparently over 600 authors will be there including special events with such folks as Malcolm Gladwell, Rachel Maddow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Phillippa Gregory, and Judge Sonia Sotomayor among others. It’ll be a huge boondoggle. I recall Kenny Loggins belting out a mini-concert, which included “Footloose,” right there on the floor amid the book booths at BookExpo 2016. I had my picture taken with him after, ha!  That was the only BookExpo I’ve been to — it was in Chicago — and man was it a fun rush. I think I loaded myself up with nearly 20 advance book copies, wow. Unfortunately this year I won’t be going, but maybe next year I’ll be back. The Expo really showcases a lot of the best coming out in the fall, which is pretty much brain candy for us readers. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with a couple of reviews of what I finished lately. 

John Burnham Schwartz’s historical novel “The Red Daughter,” which follows the life and defection to the U.S. in 1967 of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Soviet despot Joseph Stalin’s, left quite a mark on me. Wow what a complex and conflicted woman and turbulent time in history — during the Cold War no less! Although quite a bit has been written before about Svetlana’s life — later known as Lana Evans — including a few memoirs by her and a notable 2015 biography by Rosemary Sullivan, this was my first foray into reading about Stalin’s daughter and the dynamics of her situation sort of blew me away. 

At the height of the Cold War, apparently Stalin’s daughter, who sought to defect, was seen by many in the CIA and State Department as “too radioactive to handle, likely to upset the fragile balance of nuclear forces thought to be keeping the world, if only barely from self-annihilation.” But ultimately the U.S. chose not to turn away the “most important Soviet defector in our country’s history,” so notes the book. 

The novel is told via Svetlana’s fictionalized journal entries, which alternate in chapters with those of Peter Horvath’s, a lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America, 14 years after her father, Stalin’s death. They keep in touch after her defection throughout their lives and that forms the gist of the narrative. Apparently in real life the lawyer was the author’s father and that’s how he came to write this story. Although, according to an Author’s Note at the back of the book, the character of Peter Horvath was much different than his father and did not become as involved with her.

Despite these embellishments between the two, the story seems to follow Svetlana’s life fairly closely.  And my, did she come to live and move around quite a bit amid the U.S., Russia and England. She seemed a complex person who could be charismatic and bright as well as difficult and headstrong. She also seemed neither solely Russian or American but caught between East and West, feeling at times alienated by both.

Surely she made some disastrous decisions, which ended up haunting her the rest of her life. For one, Svetlana, at age 41, defected to the U.S. abruptly during a trip to India, leaving behind her children, ages 17 and 21 without warning, which left her with much remorse and longing ever after, as detailed in the book. Then while in the U.S., she joins a cult-like community run by architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, which ends badly after a couple years. And later in 1984 she decides to revoke the West and return to living in the Soviet Union with her American child, which doesn’t exactly work out either. Oy vey, what was she thinking. 

Despite these decisions, the story paints her a bit tragically and sympathetically as a figure who wished to escape her father’s infamous past (whose regime killed off many of her own relatives among the millions) and live her life on her own terms, which was never fully successful.

What I liked about it was that you really get a sense from the novel of the emotional weight of the Cold War and her decisions — her guilt as a mother for her acts — and how she couldn’t really escape her legacy. I felt sliced open just feeling the stress of all she struggled with, coming to this country like she did, as a spectacle, alone amid her circumstances. I thought the novel had some very well done passages that brought to life her mind-set and situation — making her perhaps not totally likable or forgivable but a complex figure in the clutches of history. 

Next up, I listened to the audiobook of Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel “American Spy,” whose premise lured me to pick it up …. about a female black protagonist who’s languishing at the FBI and gets picked for a task force in 1986 to insinuate herself with the “charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention.” Uh oh. 

The novel is labeled as a “spy thriller” but to me it seemed more like a coming-of-age tale or a fictional memoir about a young black woman (Marie), who wants to follow in her sister’s footsteps to become a spy. But then her sister is killed in a mysterious accident (known from the start), which Marie is still trying to get a handle on. The novel starts out with a pretty action-packed chapter of Marie and her two children surviving a home invasion and then goes back in time to various locales as Marie details her life becoming a spy that has led up to this event. 

She narrates the slow-burn of a story as if explaining to her twin boys who their father is and what happened in her career, alternating chapters from different times in her life between her FBI days in N.Y., her mission in Africa in the mid-’80s, and her current days with her mother in Martinique. It’s a bit convoluted and took quite while to get to the main gist of the story about her mission to get close to the leader of Burkina Faso. Apparently president Thomas Sankara, who’s a part of the story, was the real leader there from 1983 to 1987, so it was interesting to hear about his role in the country. I had not known of him before, or his ideology, or the various tides in Burkina Faso that were playing out during those days. 

Unfortunately at times the narrative seemed a bit weighed down with superfluous information to the plot, or too meandering, and I found the writing a bit over-explained … becoming at times convoluted and then over-simplifying what was going on and the bad guys’ operation. So I wasn’t as gripped by Marie’s story, or the writing, as I was hoping. I wanted to like the novel a bit more, but was able to see Marie’s mission through and found parts of it worthwhile. I just wouldn’t market it as a blazing spy thriller because to me it was more of a slow-burn novel about a young black woman becoming a spy that had a couple action scenes to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author puts out a sequel since this was only Marie’s first mission.

P.S. I found the cover of the paperback version of the book, which I attached at the top, much better than that of the hardback version in yellow. What do you think?

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read either of these and if so, what did you think?