White Fur by Jardine Libaire is a gritty, uncommon love story set in New York in the 80s between two very uncommon people.

Elise Perez is a girl from a broken home, a bad situation, a girl from the wrong side of town, whatever you want to say….she didn’t grow up easy. Her life has been filled with taking care of siblings when no one else was around to feed them, working dead end jobs just to pay the rent, and dropping out of high school to get away from it all. She’s made some bad decisions, cleaned herself up, fallen back down, but ultimately knows what she wants out of life.

Jamey Hyde is a junior at Yale, who grew up in a privileged family. He’s the heir to a family fortune, drives a fancy car, and has all intentions to graduate and follow in his father’s footsteps as an investment banker. Although it seems like it, he doesn’t have the “perfect” life everyone thinks.

The two come from very different worlds, yet you immediately feel the raw, desperate love between them when they meet one another. They’ve both been let down by so many others throughout their lives that when they’re together there’s a connection that’s hard to break. But, oh…others definitely try to break it. Jamey’s family desperately want things to end, while Elise has no family to really turn to. Relationships are ruined, bridges are burned, and love is pushed to its limits…several times.

I couldn’t stop reading about each character that Libaire introduced. Every time she established a new detail of Jamey or Elise, I could see it so clearly in my mind. She’s a great writer, and the attention that she shows with her characters and their personal relationships really shines through.

by Abbie Walker

Maybe if you only understand half of what a person says, you can more readily read the sincerity of their gestures. Maybe language is much less important than I think it is, and therefore much less frightening.

When Margaret Brickshaw and her husband arrive in Jordan, Cassie Hugo thinks she might have finally found a friend. But the two have little in common besides being military wives who have followed their husbands to the Middle East. Cassie is a play-it-safe rule-follower, while Margaret prefers to ignore the cultural norms and explore on her own. When a fender bender sends Margaret to the police station one afternoon, Cassie is left to watch her baby boy. Hours pass without any word from Margaret, and, desperate to figure out what’s wrong, Cassie finds her diary and begins piecing together the person she thought she knew.

The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon (author of  the short story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone) is a novel that absolutely surprised me. This tale of friendship in a foreign land hooked me from page one. Fallon’s writing and amazing sense of voice make each character come alive. The story alternates between Cassie’s narration in the present and Margaret’s diary entries. Each woman is so well-developed and their relationship feels extremely realistic.

Both outcasts in their own way, Cassie and Margaret band together out of survival. However, the women’s friendship is anything but pretty. Cassie resents Margaret’s life—her dutiful husband, the baby she can’t have—and Margaret isn’t fond of Cassie’s paranoid nature. But both have marriages that are straining under the weight of infertility or distrust. Fallon’s portrayal of a military marriage is eye-opening and raw.
One of the best parts of this book is the setting. I thoroughly enjoyed the rich details about Jordan, which made me feel like I was there. Fallon actually lived as a military wife in Jordan, so the descriptions of the people, places, and food feel real. It was fascinating to learn about the Jordanian culture and what is considered acceptable and inappropriate in that society. I think Fallon did a great job of interpreting the experience of an American living in such a different place and trying to fit in.

It was also interesting to learn about what was happening in Jordan and the Middle East in 2011, when the novel takes place. Events that would seem insignificant to Americans are immediate dangers to the characters. The political situation is as much a character in the novel because it often affects the decisions of the protagonists. Cassie and Margaret, opposite in attitude, represent the tension between wanting to enjoy life in a different country and battling the fear of foreign dangers.

Overall, this is a beautiful, well-written story about how kindness, friendship, and otherness translate between cultures. You’ll fall in love with these two women and will want to keep turning the page to see where their story goes.

A nation divided between North and South. A generation motivated by regional pride to fight in a civil war that decimates their country. A president assassinated and a fractured government. It’s a story that we’ve heard before. This time, however, it’s not the mid-19th century, but the late 21st.

The story of Omar El Akkad’s American War takes place in the world of the 2070s through the 2090s, in which the states Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina have once again seceded from the union, this time on the basis of federal laws demanding the use of renewable energy sources. It is a work of speculative fiction, one that takes many of the rifts that exist in today’s world and gives us the author’s vision of how these divisions could bring us to war again. Omar El Akkad  likely knows more about division than most, with a journalistic career that spans extremism and violence in the Middle East to the Black Lives Matter movement at Ferguson.

His novel portrays  this second civil war in a way that shows his career in journalism well, highlighting the realities of war by telling the story from two perspectives. The first is from a future figure looking back on the events as history, and the second as a contemporary account from a  young girl named Sarat, whose rural Louisiana family is caught between the two sides and must survive in the dystopia that the war creates. There are no good guys or bad guys in this book, only people who are shaped by their environment and their prejudices, and who make difficult decisions that they fully believe are right, though to our sensibilities they may seem unthinkable. This is a hypothetical war written the way that war really is; there aren’t any villains here.

The book’s narrator is a southern-born historian living in a now no-longer cold Alaska, telling the story of the girl and her family from  further into the future than the book’s setting, allowing for the author to intercut chapters with “historical documents,” e.g., a newspaper article from 2074. One of the first faux documents actually chronicles all of the events of the novel, though not through the eyes of the main characters, allowing readers to anticipate many of the major events that Sarat and her family have to actually face. Because of this, the book almost feels like future-historical fiction and is nearly a genre of its own, giving readers previous insight and prejudices about fictional, future events that the protagonist has yet to encounter.

Because of the future setting, there are science fiction elements in the novel. The skies are filled with unmanned drones that have lost their connection to the military and now fly rogue, like animals. A biological weapon becomes a plague as those who try to harness it lose control. The effects  of pollution are here, too, as much of Louisiana is now underwater. The book also has its own share of southern culture as well. Omar El Akkad writes about the South in such a way that I was surprised to learn that he wasn’t a native.

To be frank, I loved American War. I picked up the book one evening and became so enthralled by the world that I didn’t put it down again until I was finished. It is a war book, a history book, a science fiction novel, a coming-of-age story, and a look at today’s divisive culture.  El Akkad has captured literary lightning in a bottle with his debut, and I personally hope to see  many more works from him in years to come.