Dear Reviewer:

While this does sound like a great novel, I do wish you had not given away quite so many of the plot points! As a longtime book reviewer myself, I understand some of the difficulties. More snippets from the book--images, dialogue, characterizations--might have helped. I don't necessarily read lit for the plot, but this is in some sense spoiled for me by so much of it having been revealed here. The characterization of the young boy was helpful to letting us know what we'd be getting into--more of that!

Did you say the boy is supposed to be SIX and he is into porn and torture? I think I'll skip it. Thanks for the heads up.

Perhaps it was just a poor choice of quotation, but when I read this passage from the novel in the review, I thought, sheesh:

"When I get home I go under the veranda with my Playmobil men and stack them in pyramids like at Abu Ghraib and hook them up to electricity and make them screw each other in the ass, panting and pushing while I laugh at them like Lynndie England."

Unpersuasive, in the extreme. It sounds like the writer writing her agenda, rather than a character thinking. I just don't believe this voice for any child, let alone a child of an age to still be working with Playmobil guys. Sounds like an updated version of a horror cliche--a child who looks innocent but is PURE E-VILLLLLLLLLLL. If this is an example what the novel does well, the aesthetic transgressions it might perpetrate in its less exalted moments are better left encoded. IMHO.

Wow. Dumb.

Nancy Huston did not move to Europe at age 6. She settled in Paris at age 20. Can't you even do the most basic research?

(Sorry, rabid NH fan here.)

After reading the first paragraph, I was excited to read the book. After reading the description of Sol and his quoted thoughts, I'll have to give this one a pass.

There is no way that a SIX YEAR OLD could come close to having such a pointed understanding of military torture and it's effects. The kid may have seen the images on TV or the computer, and may even have re-enacted these images at home, but he would not understand that this is something to be hidden; a dirty, shameful secret that is subversive, destructive, and wrong. And, at the very least, he would not remember or know Lynndie England's name.