Rating: 87% | B+ | ★★★★
Synopsis (from Netgalley): A mysterious First Lady. The intrepid journalist writing her biography. And the secret that could destroy them both. Tired of covering the grating dysfunction of Washington and the increasingly outrageous antics of President Henry Caine, White House correspondent Sofie Morse quits her job and plans to leave politics behind. But when she gets a call from the office of First Lady Lara Caine, asking Sofie to come in for a private meeting with Lara, her curiosity is piqued. Sofie, like the rest of the world, knows little about Lara—only that Lara was born in Soviet Russia, raised in Paris, and worked as a model before moving to America and marrying the notoriously brash future president. When Lara asks Sofie to write her official biography, and to finally fill in the gaps of her history, Sofie’s curiosity gets the better of her. She begins to spend more and more time in the White House, slowly developing a bond with Lara who, to Sofie’s surprise, is entirely candid about her mysterious past. The First Lady doesn’t hesitate to speak about her beloved father’s work as an undercover KGB officer in Paris—and how he wasn’t the only person in her family working undercover during the Cold War. As her story unfolds, Sofie can’t help but wonder why Lara Caine is rehashing such sensitive information. Why to her? And why now? Spoiler-Free Review: Our American Friend is heartbreaking, fast, slow, and as twisty as one of its protagonists, First Lady Lara Caine. Pitoniak constructs an emotional retelling of the last decades of the Soviet Union through Lara’s eyes—first as a young child, then as a teenager, and finally as the wife to the most powerful man in the world. Lara’s story feels authentic; the reader is almost there with her eating ice cream on the streets of Paris and trudging through the black markets of Moscow. Pitoniak ends her novel with a series of complex twists, both tragic and joyful in their completion. Simultaneously, Sofie—the other protagonist—feels incredibly real and as dedicated to New York as Lara is to Paris. As a New Yorker, I always enjoy romanticizations of Manhattan; Pitoniak skillfully delivers. The only qualm I have with the novel is that it is unquestionably a thinly-veiled critique of the Trump Administration. The politics are hardly an issue—in fact, I think Sofie’s conflicting opinions over sympathizing with Lara covers much of the real-life conflict over Melania Trump—but the disjointed nature of the critique is. The novel could have functioned without also taking on the burden of shadowing the Trump Administration; it simply is too soon for that. Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
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