I picked this book up solely because it was part of the Tournament of Books' summer camp, and now I'm the more knowledgeable for having read it. I'm not much for thrillers, which is what I thought it was structured as—the first scene was riveting and intense and made my heart thump. In the end, AMERICAN SPY was a completely fascinating read that only suffers from the framework of its narration.

Marie Mitchell is an American spy during the Cold War. She's our protagonist and narrator. She's strong, defiant, and keeps her cards incredibly close to her chest. She is not what she seems, and she's constantly defined in stereotypes by her co-workers and managers as a black woman. Of course she becomes essential (and she knows it) for a super-secret CIA mission in 1980s Burkina Faso. If you don't know much about the US/CIA intervention in Africa—something I primarily associated with South and Central America (my heritage, in a way)—this book is a good gateway into that, and especially the figure of Thomas Sankara and the ideologies and coups that defined his country in that era. The fiction novel provoked me to look more into that history that I'd barely heard. The figure of Marie is fictional (unlike Sankara