While I was unfamiliar with the author, the summary caught my interest in spite of an inherent dislike for stories of war and the human trauma it creates. Well written with intriguing characters, the plot hit my buttons to the point where I could no longer bear the direction. It's difficult to rate stories about topics we don't enjoy, so I'm giving it a 3.5 rating. On to books of interest! ( )

Family saga set in Florida in a small town near St Augustine. I picked this up after reading Laura Lee Smith’s Ice House several years ago (which I loved), but this one is not in the same league. I found it long and dreary. The characters are an unlikeable bunch. It is mainly about life in a small town, where developers want to buy up the land and turn it into a tourist trap. I could not muster much enthusiasm for it. ( )

"The Girl In Green" is one of those books that I want to tell everyone else I know to read but which is difficult either to summarise or categorise, so I'll start with why I like it so much.

I love Derek Miller's ability to bring to bear his deep knowledge of the lives of the soldiers, NGOs and civilians who struggle within Middle East war zones, while creating credibly imperfect characters whose worldviews barely overlap and tieing them together in a story arc that stretches decades, embraces difficult moral challenges, recognises that there are no easy answers and yet never slides into voyeurism or despair. He even manages to pepper the story with the kind of grim humour that offers a way of not losing your sanity when you recognise the cruelties you are powerless to change or stop.

Derek Miller leads us through this bleak landscape in the company of a British journalist, Thomas Benton, a US Army private, Arwood Hobbes and a Swedish Aid Worker, Märta Ström. The story starts in Kuwait in 1991, shortly after the end of Desert Storm. Benton and Hobbes find themselves in the middle of a slaughter from which they attempt, unsuccessfully, to rescue a young girl in a green dress who they've only just met. The brutality of what they see and their own powerless scars both of them deeply enough to reshape their lives.
They don't meet again until 2013 when a video showing a girl in green in another desert war drives Hobbes to entice Benton back to a war zone for one last time on what may or may not be a Quixotic mission to rescue a girl they both saw die twenty-two years earlier.
The story that follows is tense and surprising, filled with a diverse set of characters are larger than life and yet, in their circumstances, quite believable. It has many memorable scenes that I mentally gave titles like "The bit with the frozen Chickens", "The bit with the boy in the minefield", "The bit with that grinning bastard with a gun". If there was nothing more to "The Girl In Green" than that, it would be well worth reading as a slightly quirky, indy-thriller with a slightly off-beat sense of humour, yet the book offers much more than that.

For me, the main pleasure of "The Girl In Green" came not from its plot but from the truths it told and the worldviews of the people it presented. The gap of twenty-two years is important. It's enough time for people to change, for their memories to haunt them, for their dreams to die and yet, after all that time, there is still a desert war, this time in Syria, with foreign soldiers, journalists and aid workers following their own agendas and trying and inevitably failing, to understand the people waging the war or falling victim to it.
Benton has spent his life reporting wars without ever being able to make them or himself understood back home. Hobbes has made the full transition from ignorant grunt to commercial contractor. Ström is now more experienced, more senior but less hopeful than before about her ability even to limit the damage being done.

I liked the way the book acknowledged and demonstrated the cultural differences between the various foreigners involving themselves in desert wars: American, British, Swedish and French, with each of them absorbing and responding to the foreign war in their own way. This was a pleasant change for Hollywood's unrelenting mono-culturalism.

I came away knowing how little we who sit in safety, watching the world through social media and newsfeeds, understand of the reality of the wars being fought in the Middle East. We are fed context-light, often fact-free, ideology-led stories that explain our involvement and our impact with all the depth, accuracy and independence of thought of an infomercial for selling exercise equipment to the obese.

"The Girl Green" shows the damage we do and the damage that is done to us in a very human way. It pulls no punches but it pushes no ideology other than a commitment to honesty. It left me feeling that there are no right answers here but there are many wrong ones and that we are as likely to support them as oppose them.

I strongly recommend this book to you if you want to be entertained and given the opportunity to think outside your normal patterns. ( )

Witty dialogue and vivid scenery made this an interesting and fast read. The author has his Ph.D. in international relations, so there were some chapters that read more like an NPR investigative report. In general, this was an enjoyable read. ( )

I am drawn to this author. I loved [Norwegian at Night] which was his first published novel. This one is written in a similar style in a very different setting. The story takes place in Iraq, first in 1991 and then 2013. The author is well versed in the work of humanitarian aid organizations which informed his story-telling and sense of place. The reader is taken back and forth from the present to events in the past that impacted the way a particular character was thinking or acting. I think Miller gets the balance just right, enough background to inform, but not overwhelm the narrative of the present story. For those sensitive to tough violence, there are scenes that are not right for you. That said, the violence was impactful, but not gratuitous. The only criticism I have is a small one about the last chapter. After all the action in the book, that last chapter serving as an epilogue was too sluggish for my taste, but then that pace adequately fit the mood so there’s that. I’m not sure what I was hoping for, but I was a little let down by the conclusion, not the outcome, just the pace. Can’t say more without spoilers. Highly recommend this book for readers who like fast paced action, lots of dialogue, pop culture references, reflection on real events, dark humor. ( )