American Spy

Title: American Spy,  by: Lauren Wilkinson 

Summary: 
Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer working for the FBI in 1986, so it's during the Cold War. She wants to be a lot like her older sister, also a fed, who got conscripted into the army at a young age, with dreams of being a spy. Marie has a lot of qualities that land her a job to undermine Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, who is mostly a Communist. It gets tricky when she actually falls in love with him though, & she will do anything to spare his life. ...but it might be too late.
This book successfully weaves together the themes of racism, family & politics. 

Quotes: 
"It was like he saw a version of you that was superior to the version you saw of yourself. It was very generous. And it was inspiring, that reminder of the better angels of your nature."  

"If they don't want you, don't fight their wars. 
It's that easy, huh?" (Marie to her sister Helen about working in intelligence.) 

"Democracy isn't a thing you conform a society to. We can't just import a system from the West. Real democracy has to develop in response to the needs of that society."  


My Rating: 
4.5/5 out of 5 (it was a pageturner! Fairly clean & not much language.)