Cara Hoffman

i decided to read this book because i saw someone say that the author got told that it was "too angry". the world doesn't like angry girls. and it especially doesn't like angry girls who won't shut up. i am often an angry girl; so, i grabbed the book. i had a vague idea of the plot going in, but i didn't expect everything i read. i guessed a few of the twists, some not until right as they were being revealed, but that's not what's important about this book. many of the lines hit me hard (as show more a pretty socially conscious woman, not a lot of it was new information) but they still hit me regardless. but, what jumped out at me the most, was,

It would hardly be rational to accept that I live inside a thing made of flesh that people capture, hide, and then wait in line to rape.

and,

Wendy White was raped, killed, and dumped. Men raped her, men killed her, men dumped her, men found her, men are examining her remains, men are looking for the men who did it. Then the men who did it will be represented in court by men, and a man will make the decision based on laws men made throughout the legal history of this country.

this is an angry book. it's angry for a damn good reason. show less

Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You follows soldier Lauren Clay on her first few days home following a tour of duty in Iraq. There’s a strong arc to this story: unsatisfactory meetings with old friends and family leading to Lauren’s decision to take her younger brother on a survivalist journey through a remote area of Canada in midwinter.

Suspenseful as that narrative is, the real heart of the book is the characters and their wrestling with questions of identity. What makes this book show more exceptional is what people think, not what they do. Lauren, not surprisingly, has the roughest time of it, unable to drop her vigilance and expectation of command (she was an NCO) as she returns to civilian life. For her, entering the military was an economic, not an ideological, decision and she questions what exactly it was she fought for. In her old church, she redefines the faith in which she was raised:

The stained glass windows were dimly lit and she looked at them pane by pane; the long slow journey of Jesus, dragging his cross from window to window, until the Roman soldiers crucified him. It was a storyboard, she thought, like the kind you have to make and go over with your CO when you get back from a capture or kill. The stations of the cross were so everyone had their story straight, created agreement and uniformity in reporting the event. [...] Insurgent Jesus. [...] The stations of the cross made sense now, one more common war story hiding in plain sight.

The characters around Lauren struggle with their own displacements. Her high school boyfriend has moved on to college and resents reminders of his working class origins. Her best friend’s early motherhood has limited her to minimum-wage jobs despite her outstanding high school record. There are “the Patricks” three brilliant, but failed men and a choir director who lost a promising career to alcoholism. All of these characters are drawn with a detail and honesty that makes them simultaneously sympathetic and irritating.

If I were to call any book I’ve read this year a “must read,” it would be this one. The examination of the price paid by those who go to war on our behalf and of the compromises made necessary by poverty is rich—as is the prose in which it is presented. show less

Lauren’s mother had left the family when she was young and her father suffered from severe depression spending most of his days in bed. By the time she was ten, she had become parent to her younger brother Daniel. She had a brilliant singing voice and had won a scholarship to a prestigious music school but, without a responsible wage-earning parent to ensure Daniel’s future, she instead enlisted in the military, not for patriotic reasons, but for the signing bonus.

Now Lauren has returned show more home to Watertown, NY just in time for Christmas after a tour of duty in iraq. She seems, on the surface, to have come home relatively unscathed but, as she interacts with family and friends, it becomes clear that she has changed. However, they refuse to see the changes in her, wanting and expecting her to reintegrate into civilian life as if she never left. To her, they seem weak and undisciplined, refusing to follow orders and unable to appreciate the hardships of war and the sacrifices that she and all the others like her have made. The only person who seems to understand her is her music teacher, a vet himself, who, after serving, lost a promising music career to alcoholism. But even he is unable to bring back the old Lauren.

She tells her brother that they are going to visit their mother. Instead, she takes him to a deserted village in northern Canada near the Jeanne d’Arc Basin where she tries to teach him skills she has learned in the army. As she makes plans for them to visit one of the soldiers in her platoon who has told her about the opportunities on the oil rigs in the Basin, the horrors that she experienced in Iraq are finally revealed to the reader.

In Be Safe I Love You, author Cara Hoffman shows the devastating effects combat has on soldiers, men but especially women in an empathetic, moving but unflinching way. At a time when soldiers are much in the news with the huge backlog at the American VA and the recent spate of suicides among vets here in Canada and with so much lip-service (and little else) paid by politicians in support of vets, Hoffman paints a somewhat disturbing but important portrait of what life is like for returning vets. show less

Be Safe I Love You is a moving story of a young female soldier’s homecoming after service in Iraq. Lauren Clay enlisted in the army after her high school graduation in order to provide financial security for her younger brother and depressive father. After five years of service her commitment is finished and she has returned home to Watertown, NJ, fresh from a nine month tour in Afghanistan.

With compassion and sensitivity, Hoffman exposes the struggle many returning soldiers face in show more reconnecting with the people and places they left behind. Family and friends are sure Lauren just needs some time to readjust to civilian life and the inevitable changes that have happened in her absence, but it soon becomes obvious to the reader that Lauren is suffering from the more severe symptoms of PTSD as she begins to experience black outs and hallucinations.

Amongst the confusion and anger Lauren is experiencing she develops twin obsessions, to toughen up her thirteen year old brother, determined to ensure he experiences the world without the buffer of a computer screen, and to meet up with a soldier she served with and follow through on their plans to work together at the Hebron oilfields. The tension arises as Lauren struggles to keep her grip on reality, and under the guise of a visit to their mother, heads for Canada with an unsuspecting Danny in tow.

Of the entire novel what really struck me was Lauren’s thoughts about her service in Iraq …”officially women weren’t in combat. They just support. It was the same f** job as every soldier she served with, but with the added downgrade in title and pay.” In Be Safe I Love You, Hoffman honours the female experience of war, something rarely explored in fiction despite more women having been killed in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq than in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.

Be Safe I Love You is a thoughtful and thought provoking story, and though the conclusion is a little too neat and easy, I think it is a novel well worth your time. show less