Camp Zero

Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling (2023) 320 pages

I listened to the audiobook on Libby. There are three narrators because there are three main parts of the story. This science fiction story is a subgenre called cli-fi, which means it is science fiction in the near future dealing with climate disaster. The globe is warming, the southern part of the U.S. is having record heat waves and wildfires (sound familiar?). Those that survive are pushing north into the previously frozen tundra of Canada. If you ever wanted to spend more time with the Jezebels in The Handmaid's Tale, this story might be for you. The main part of the plot follows Rose and other young women, all named after flowers, who work as "Blooms" in a far North mining/construction camp. Then there is a privileged college grad who takes a teaching job at the camp. His rosy outlook is quickly brought down by the harsh conditions at the arctic location. Third, we meet the women soldiers working at a military meteorological research station in another camp up north. Things get desperate and gruesome at times, since there is no escape for many of the characters. I didn't love the way the three plots are tied together in the end, but the journey leading up to those last chapters was pretty entertaining.
 

Sara

Sara / Garth Ennis, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser,  unpaged

It's 1942 and Sara is part of an elite group of  Soviet women snipers at the front, battling the Nazis.  Sara has become a legend for the shocking number of kills she's achieved, but that doesn't mean she's got it easy.  She scorns the gung-ho patriotism and not-so-subtle surveillance of their local NKVD representative Raisa, and when she learns the truth about what happened to her home village, her grief and anger threaten to get her in real trouble.  The art is most evocative when Sara is perched high in a tree in the midst of a hunt.  An interesting slice of WWII experience.

The Unwomanly Face of War

The Unwomanly Face of War: an Oral History of Women in World War II / Svetlana Alexievich, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 331 pp.

The first book by the Nobel-winning author of Secondhand Time; now in a new translation by the team that translated the text of War and Peace we read for our very first Big Book Challenge.  I'd been waiting for months to get my hands on this and it did not disappoint.  As with Secondhand Time, we read history through the voices of ordinary Russians who made that history; in this case, our speakers are women who insisted on their right to participate at the front in the Great Patriotic War.

They were antiaircraft gunners, pilots, drivers, surgeons, nurses, telephone operators, partisans and more.  Reading these brief, intense individual accounts creates an amazingly layered, almost choral effect.  Much of what the women recount is so horrible that the book can't be read quickly; it's just too much.  Clothing caked with dried blood is much sharper than that with dried laundry starch.  When men die they look up, not to the side. The worst part of hand-to-hand combat is the sound of bones crunching.  It's ghoulish, but there's so much more to this book.  I learned that many of these women were shunned when they returned from the war - they were considered unmarriageable and unfit for most jobs.  Often they returned home after fighting for years to find that family members had been sent to labor camps by Stalin.  Many of them willingly left their children in the care of others for the duration, so strongly did they feel about their duty to defend the Motherland.  When they returned, their children didn't recognize them and their neighbors wondered if they were capable of caring for their families.  Most poignant is the almost universal gratitude they express to Alexievich, for finally listening to their stories.

The Right Side

The Right Side by Spencer Quinn, 323 pages.
Spencer Quinn is the author of the "Chet and Bernie" mysteries,  stories that all apparently feature a dog helping the detective solve crime. That doesn't sound all that appealing to me, but after reading The Right Side, and after finding out that Spencer Quinn is a pseudonym for prolific author Peter Abrahams, I would be willing to give them a try. Abrahams has written a wide array of thrillers over the years and they almost never disappoint.
The main character in this novel is Afghan War vet LeAnne Hogan.  On her last tour, Sgt. Hogan had served with a CST, or Cultural Support Team. It's a real thing apparently, female soldiers work with special operations combat teams to "engage the female population in an objective area when such contact may be deemed culturally inappropriate if performed by a male servicemember." On Hagan's last mission, things went terribly wrong; her friend was killed and she was badly hurt. The book moves between Hagan's earlier life with her parents and her plans, her time in the Army, and then focuses on her PSTD-marred present. While trying to adjust to her circumstances, or maybe to find a way back to her pre-trauma self, Hagan flees Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland and ends up in Washington state, at the home of a dead comrade. Along the way she finds a dog and solves a mystery (the book itself is not a mystery, but you can imagine the sequels with the angry soldier and her trusty canine helping out those in need), and both of these smaller plotlines add to the story. A good story with a compelling main character.

Soldier Girls

Soldier Girls: the battles of three women at home and at war / Helen Thorpe 397 pg.

Interested in our various wars? This is the book you have been waiting for.  Unlike the many novels about Iraq and Afghanistan and the many high level analyses, this tells the story of actual soldiers who spent time in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  The book follows three women who signed up for the Indiana National Guard but end up on active duty.  Certainly it is impossible for us to imagine getting pulled out of you life and daily routines for a year and get sent to a foreign place with few amenities and your life is in danger.  I've yet to read a book that really conveys the real consequences to the people who serve...that is until now.

This book is excellent and important.  I won't bother to summarize the events and the people because you should read it yourself.  It will give you a taste of the struggles of these people who we think of as "soldiers" and forget they are just like you and me.  They have families, relationships and serving does not leave them unaffected. Read about real people and see how veteran benefits and services seem even less adequate than you thought.

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The People of Forever Are Not Afraid / Shani Boianjiu / 338 p.

These are the stories of Yael, Lea, and Avishag, Israeli teens from a small village near the Lebanese border.  The story begins near the end of their last year in high school and takes them through their years of military service.  On the one hand this was fascinating and completely engrossing, a very quick intense read.  In Boianjiu's telling, Israel's young people live lives that are steeped in every kind of horrific violence, from random checkpoint attacks, roving shooters, actual war casualties, to suicide and plain interpersonal cruelty.  And she's very effective at demonstrating nuance and compassion for Israelis and Palestinians alike.  But I have a problem with any novel that's so drenched in physical tragedy (I think of this as the Arundhati Roy syndrome: just one more rape, shooting, murder, whatever - then I'll have something truly dramatic, thinks the author.)  In the case of Boianjiu, it's not that I think she's exaggerating anything.  It's just that one novel can only handle so much blood before it becomes numbing and kind of dull.

Another problem is that while the novel has three main characters, with chapters told from alternating points of view, they seem to have only one voice.  This makes the novel hard to follow, and hollows out the three characters.  Boianjiu is definitely talented (I think this is her first novel) and I will be interested to see what she does next.