She spends most of the story telling her children (and us) how great she was at her job, at reading people’s ‘faces’, and playing mind games. I never gained an impression of how she felt about anything really, especially about her feelings towards the FBI or her work as a spy or even Sankara. Her detailing of office politics is lifeless. Her narration is bogged down by exposition. We learn of Marie’s childhood, how her mother left her and her older sister in her father’s care, her beginnings at the FBI….by the time we meet her ‘target’, Thomas Sankara, who was the President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987, we are nearly at the halfway mark, and by then I had grown already bored by Marie monotone narration. In American Spy a Black female former FBI intelligence agent is recounting to her sons-whom she addresses as ‘you’-her experiences growing up in the Queens, working for the FBI-a notoriously white and male ‘club’-and her time as a spy.
What could have been an intriguing tale of espionage is thwarted by lacklustre execution: painfully slow pacing, watching-paint-dry levels of entertainment, cardboard characters, robotic narration, dry dialogues, heavy on the telling…Īside from its snazzy cover & title, and that brief mention of Nella Larsen’s Passing, I sadly didn’t like anything about this novel. American Spy opens with a bang only to come screeching to halt within a few pages.
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