American Spy

This debut novel by Lauren Wilkinson "was a Washington Post bestseller, an NAACP Image Award nominee, an Anthony award nominee, and an Edgar Award nominee. It was short-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a Barnes & Noble Book of the Month, a PBS book club pick, and was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Recommended Reading List" (author website). NPR says,  "American Spy works on so many levels — it's an expertly written spy thriller as well as a deeply intelligent literary novel that tackles issues of politics, race and gender in a way that's never even close to being heavy-handed or didactic."  They go on to say that "Wilkinson doesn't shy away from the moral ambiguity of American adventurism in the 1980s, and neither does her unforgettable narrator, Marie, who tells her sons, 'One thing I can say for sure is that I don't want you to be moral absolutists. If what I'm telling you of our story means to you that the people it involves are either saved or damned, then you'll have misunderstood me.'"

The year is 1992, and it's the middle of the night when Marie Mitchell is alerted by an ominous floorboard creaking in her rural Connecticut home; she retrieves her gun from the safe under her desk and silently awaits the man who has come to kill her. In the struggle, she shoots him instead and, with her young twin sons in tow,  flees to the sanctuary of her mother's small farm on a Caribbean island. Here's the backstory that is gradually revealed in the book, as summarized by Kirkus:

"It’s 1987, and Marie Mitchell has hit the wall as an FBI agent. She’s patronized and marginalized by her boss, who relegates her to little more than recruiting informants (or “snitches,” as she derisively calls them) and filing “oppressive amounts of paperwork.” This is not how this idealistic (but hardly naïve) daughter of an NYPD officer hoped her life would turn out back when she and her sister, Helene, dreamed of becoming secret agents when they grew up. At this low point of her professional life, Marie is recruited by Ed Ross, a smooth-talking CIA official, to take part in a covert operation to undermine the regime of Burkina Faso’s magnetic young president, Thomas Sankara, a Marxist influenced by the example of the martyred revolutionary Che Guevara. From the beginning of her assignment, Marie is both wary of the agency’s reasons for taking down Sankara and skeptical toward Sankara’s leftist politics, though the closer she gets to Sankara, the less inclined she is to dismiss his efforts to improve his nation’s welfare. Nevertheless, Marie has another, more personal motive for accepting the assignment: the agent-in-charge, Daniel Slater, was both a colleague and lover of her sister, who fulfilled her ambition to become a spy but died in a car accident whose circumstances remain a mystery to Marie and her family. The more embedded Marie gets in her assignment, the less certain she is of what that assignment entails and of who, or what, she’s really working for. Falling in love with her target—Sankara, who in real life was violently overthrown that same year—is yet another complication that further loosens Marie’s professional resolve." Kirkus goes on to conclude by saying, "There’s an honorable, unsung tradition of African-American novelists using the counterspy genre as a metaphor for what W.E.B. Du Bois called "double consciousness," and Wilkinson’s book is a noteworthy contribution." Or as The Nation puts it, "Wilkinson does not graft the matter of race onto the spy novel but rather asks us to think about how being a minority is, in a sense, an act of espionage, a precarious state marked by shifting identities, competing loyalties, and a constant threat of violence." And the Washington Post notes, "...also striking is the novel’s deeper recognition that, to some extent, rudimentary tradecraft is something all of her African American characters have learned as an everyday survival skill. As Marie’s father wryly tells her on the day of her graduation from the FBI training academy at Quantico, “I’ve been a spy in this country for as long as I can remember.”

Part of the twisty tale leads us down Marie's path of discovery about who is really pulling the strings. Much of the book allows us inside Marie's mind and feelings as the story is largely told in a long letter to her two sons--"I'm writing this to give you honest answers to the questions I hazard to guess you'll ask while you're growing up. I'm writing it all down here just in case I'm not around to tell you."Their parentage, when revealed, will not surprise, but the ending will leave you hanging, not in an unpleasant way, but certainly with a sense of loss about not knowing the outcome.

High praise for the book abounds including The New York Journal of Books,  The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and The Nation. The Nation's review offers the most comprehensive discussion of race vis a vis national and global politics.