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A review by jdintr
Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman
4.0
In Dark at the Crossing, Elliot Ackerman, himself an Iraq War veteran, ties the fighting of the Aughts to the terror of our present decade through the character of Haris, an Iraqi expatriate returning to the region to fight against the Assad regime for.... Well that's part of the tangled Syrian web, isn't it?
Haris, like many American collaborators, has left Iraq with his sister, living for a time in Michigan, but the beginning of the novel finds him on the Turkish border city of Kilis, trying to cross a closed border to fight on behalf of rebel forces. Daesh (ISIS) is also in town, and Haris's handlers pry the murky ground of mixed allegiances that emerge in any war zone.
There is a relationship Haris forges with Daphne, a grieving mother desperate to return to Aleppo to comb the rubble for her missing daughter. I don't want to call this a 'love story,' because while Haris and Daphne certainly draw closer, the intimacy one would look for in such a tale is completely missing. I could say they come together like two rafts lashed together to run a rapids more than "two ships passing in the night."
Ackerman's sense of setting is vivid, but I never got the motivation of key characters like Haris and Amir, costing this well-written book a fifth star in my opinion.
For those who enjoyed Iraq War novels like The Yellow Birds and Redeployment, this is a novel that is definitely worth adding to the canon.
Haris, like many American collaborators, has left Iraq with his sister, living for a time in Michigan, but the beginning of the novel finds him on the Turkish border city of Kilis, trying to cross a closed border to fight on behalf of rebel forces. Daesh (ISIS) is also in town, and Haris's handlers pry the murky ground of mixed allegiances that emerge in any war zone.
There is a relationship Haris forges with Daphne, a grieving mother desperate to return to Aleppo to comb the rubble for her missing daughter. I don't want to call this a 'love story,' because while Haris and Daphne certainly draw closer, the intimacy one would look for in such a tale is completely missing. I could say they come together like two rafts lashed together to run a rapids more than "two ships passing in the night."
Ackerman's sense of setting is vivid, but I never got the motivation of key characters like Haris and Amir, costing this well-written book a fifth star in my opinion.
For those who enjoyed Iraq War novels like The Yellow Birds and Redeployment, this is a novel that is definitely worth adding to the canon.