Eleven Days Author: Visit Amazon's Lea Carpenter Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0307951030 | Format: PDF
Eleven Days Description
From Publishers Weekly
A woman falls into the national spotlight when her Navy SEAL son goes missing during a highly classified operation in Carpenter's debut novel. Sara, an art student who landed a secretarial job in D.C, and David, a mysterious government official 30 years her senior, find themselves expecting a child during a complex love affair. Sara elects to keep the baby—naming him Jason—and becomes a single mother when David dies in the Middle East of undisclosed causes. She raises Jason with help from various "godparents", David's friends and coworkers who predispose the naturally brilliant child to the military at the youngest of ages. After the September 11th attacks, Jason's decides to attend the Naval Academy , marking the beginning of a sacrificial quest that, after nine years, he plans to end after one more mission—the mission in which he disappears. The novel profiles the first eleven days of Sara's grief journey, and is filled with characters who exist on the edge of emotion. With poignant prose and an impeccably structured narrative, Carpenter's novel is the sweet pitch before the violin screeches; the concluding state of reverence for a world we can't control and a song for the war in Afghanistan that provides comfort without reason. (June)
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
Tension builds in Carpenter’s spare debut as single mother Sara awaits news of Jason, her Navy SEAL son, missing in action on a top-secret mission. Their story is reduced to very nearly its barest bones, told mainly via Jason’s letters home and his and Sara’s reminiscences. Carpenter succeeds in making Sara an Everymother as she tries to reckon how her bookish, poetry-loving son could choose a career path that puts him in mortal danger with every overseas tour. She eventually reasons that she “had not lost a son on 9/11; she lost him later to something she could not provide at home.” But it is clear that what she and Jason’s deceased father each did give their son—whose teammates nicknamed him Priest—prepared him for nothing less than personal greatness, the kind of personal greatness that makes the best Navy SEAL. Subtle clues and a couple of plot twists sustain the story’s tautness until its emotive climax. --Donna Chavez
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Series: Vintage Contemporaries
- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (March 11, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307951030
- ISBN-13: 978-0307951038
- Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
ELEVEN DAYS by Lea Carpenter is a lean but intense debut novel written with a virtuoso's pen dipped deeply into the inkwell of relentless passion and penetrating focus. It is a dynamic work propelled by the explosive power of war fiction to compel the reader to ponder not only the most basic truths about the warrior's culture and the conflicts they engage in, but also the family of the warrior and the great sacrifices they must make in time of war.
Rich with literary allusion and poetic symbolism, this novel offers a keen and precise perspective of the military, war, patriotism, one's service to one's country, the military family and the complexity of the human cost of war.
As only a work of art can reveal, ELEVEN DAYS offers deeply resonating, very personal truths about military service in time of conflict as seen through the vision of a devoted mother and her warrior son.
It is not uncommon for us to make the association of our modern day military heroes with the heroes of the great mythical narratives in classical literature - Odysseus, Dionysus, Achilles, Jason. Thanks to the scholar Joseph Campbell and his masterwork The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell), the "hero's journey" has become a well known quest which follows a basic pattern of Departure (sometimes called Separation), Initiation, and Return. It is probably not a coincidence then that Ms. Carpenter has named the hero of ELEVEN DAYS - Jason.
Jason is a well-tested and proven warrior, a United States Navy SEAL who was one of the great numbers of young men and women compelled by their patriotism and courage to enlist into military service after the 9/11 terror attacks. He is twenty-seven when the novel opens.
I have been warily looking forward to this book - wary because it's gotten a lot of advance praise, and the last time I bought into that, I was disappointed. But, the fact that it earned that pre-publication attention made me await it all the same.
It's one of the best close-up looks into what makes a military member 'tick' that I've ever read. The motivations, the dreams, the professionalism mixed with youth and cynicism all feels very real. While author Lea Carpenter has chosen the Navy SEALs as her subject matter, with a young officer the main character, I think you could fill that in with most any branch, of most any rank, and it still rings true across the board. "Jason," the SEAL in question, seems to fairly represent the ideals and life that these special operations soldiers have chosen - not in a melodramatic, overwrought way like many self-serving biographies, but in the much quieter way of real life. I'm no SEAL, but as a military veteran, I feel like on my best days this was sort of what we were all going for - most of us didn't live up to it, but we liked to think we were trying.
It's no mistake that Carpenter is not a veteran herself (though I think her father is a retired Navy captain). That distance gives the edge of objectivity lacking in a lot of veteran-written narratives. Even the recent vet-written collection "Fire and Forget," which I also really liked, is often very self-aware, not always in a good way. Without that crutch of her own memory to draw from, Carpenter relied on interviews, research and readers to help her get the story right - she does a lot of thanking in her acknowledgements, and that effort at getting it right comes through...at least for me.
Eleven Days Preview
Link
Please Wait...