San Francisco Chronicle // Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter
My review of Lea Carpenter’s novel Eleven Days ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on 7/14/13.
“Throughout the relatively short history of our great nation, we’ve proved ourselves to be a warring people. Warfare has inspired some of our greatest literature, from Whitman’s poems about the Civil War to the rapidly expanding shelf of books dedicated to the Overseas Contingency Operation (once known as the Global War on Terror). Lea Carpenter’s debut novel, Eleven Days, tells a story that is at once timeless and also grounded in the very real vicissitudes brought about by current events.”
[…]
“Eleven Days raises another hugely valuable point. It’s a source of national shame, I believe, that even in wartime those of us here on the home front can stroll so blithely through our days without much thought to the women and men serving overseas. The current war is a mere abstraction to so many of us; it’s happening somewhere else. Eleven Days could very well help to close the gap between those families who are making tremendous sacrifices on behalf of the nation and those of us who are benefiting from them.”