R. Harper Mason

Take this with a grain of salt, because a lot of this could be the result of the digitization process (I read the Kindle version), but this book is riddled with sentence structure errors, spelling errors, and instances of words being out of order in a sentence to the point that it looks like someone threw it together in one sitting and then never edited it or had anyone proofread it. At a few points, I had to go back over some sentences to try to figure out what the author was trying to say.

In terms of being a page flipper, the story was very good, but it's good in the way that Jack Ryan novels are good: entertaining, but not necessarily a good place to look for accurate information about conditions in the country (Afghanistan) or military practices and procedures there.

That being said, from personal experience of 8 years in the US Army, it's obvious that the person that wrote this has a thorough understanding of the military 'culture', especially in terms of how anonymous and overly bureaucratic the system is, and how it often does things without thinking about the details or what's going to be achieved, which is ironic, since "attention to detail" is a concept that's hammered into each enlisted soldier.

A few of the plot turns were sort of obvious, or at least I saw them coming a few pages before they happened. Some of the plot twists seemed a little forced and some of the foreshadowing sort of ruined later, significant plot twists. The story could have been told with a bit more subtlety. However, the story was in no way ruined by these things. It's still a very well told story and an exciting book to read.

[Update: After thinking about this book and letting it sort of sink in, I'm realizing that the writing style is probably best described as teen fiction. It may even perpetuate stereotypes and lead to further misunderstanding among people who pick this up thinking they're going to see an accurate representation of Afghanistan and its culture. The book also seems to project the idea that the only means for Afghanistan to achieve 'normalcy' is by scrapping their own culture and adopting Western culture wholesale: i.e., the escape from Afghanistan is to become Western. I think that's an ethnocentric and oversimplified view of the evolution of a culture that is very different from US culture and doesn't have to be the same as ours to be successful or 'right'.]… (more)