What They Say.....From the bestselling author of Pay It Forward comes the stunning and emotional story of a young soldier’s unthinkable act . . . and the bonds of a sister and brother’s love.
Ruth and her little brother, Aubrey, are just teenagers when their older brother ships off to Iraq. When Joseph returns, uninjured, only three and a half months later, Ruth is happy he is safe but also deeply worried. How can it be that her courageous big brother has been dishonorably discharged for refusing to go out on duty? Aubrey can’t believe that his hero doesn’t have very good reasons.
Yet as the horrifying details of the incident emerge, Joseph disappears. In their attempts to find him, Ruth and Aubrey discover he has a past far darker than either of them could imagine. But even as they learn more about their brother, important questions remain unanswered—why did he betray his unit, his country, and now his family? Joseph’s refusal to speak ignites a fire in young Aubrey that results in a disastrous, and public, act of rebellion.
The impact of Joseph’s fateful decision one night in Baghdad will echo for years to come, with his siblings caught between their love for him and the media’s engulfing frenzy of judgment. Will their family ever make their way back to each other and find a way to forgive?
What I Say.....I love Catherine Ryan Hyde, and usually her books are an easy win for me. But this one dragged on a little. I think mostly because I'm sick of hearing about Bowe Bergdahl - first the Serial podcast, then this book. I wasn't that interested in the first place, to be honest.
So this issue may have been mine - especially since I see it has a high 4 rating on Goodreads, but I just had a hard time getting into it.
The main theme was the entire family didn't know how to communicate and kept their feelings to themselves, but this also made the narration of the story very flat, and didn't pull me in emotionally like most of Hyde's books.
So this is the first official unfinished book of 2016. And it's killing me, with my compulsive need for closure.
No comments:
Post a Comment