Vietnam

I love Erika Robuck’s writing, so I was excited to get her new novel from Net Galley. This tells the story of Dickey Chapelle, an American female photojournalist who was active in the post-WWII to early Vietnam War years. I had never heard of her and found this story so interesting! She was intelligent, brave, intrepid, enterprising, and Robuck paints her as a very real person. I really enjoyed this and highly recommend it to those who enjoy historical fiction with strong female protagonists.

Thank you for my copy!

Here’s the scoop:

From bestselling author Erika Robuck comes the perilous and awe-inspiring true story of award-winning photojournalist Dickey Chapelle as she risks everything to show the American people the price of war through the lens of her camera.

Manhattan, 1956.

Since her arrest for disobeying orders and going ashore at Iwo Jima almost a decade earlier, combat correspondent Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle has been unmoored. Her military accreditation revoked, her marriage failing, and her savings dwindling, Dickey jumps at an opportunity to work with an international refugee association—one with intelligence ties. In the aftermath of a refugee rescue that goes wrong, a flame is lit deep inside Dickey— to survive in order to be the world’s witness to war from the front lines.

Never content to report on battles unless her own boots are on the ground, Dickey and her camera journey with American and international soldiers from frozen wastelands, to raging seas, to luscious jungles, covering the plight of those suffering from humanity’s endless cycle of violence. Told in an alternating prose and epistolary format, The Last Assignment takes readers along on Dickey’s missions to the Hungarian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and the earliest days of the war in Vietnam, revealing one woman’s extraordinary courage and tenacity in the face of discrimination and danger.

And it’s along the way, in Dickey’s desire to save the world, she realizes she might also be saving herself.

Description

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant comes a twisting story of love and deceit: an American man vanishes on a rural road in Vietnam, and his girlfriend, an emergency room doctor trained to ask questions, follows a path that leads her home to the very hospital where they met.

The first time Alexis saw Austin, it was a Saturday night. Not in a bar, but in the emergency room where Alexis sutured a bullet wound in Austin’s arm. Six months later, on the brink of falling in love, they travel to Vietnam on a bike tour so that Austin can show her his passion for cycling and he can pay his respects to the place where his father and uncle fought in the war. But as Alexis sips white wine and waits at the hotel for him to return from his solo ride, two men emerge from the tall grass and Austin vanishes into thin air. The only clue he leaves behind is a bright yellow energy gel dropped on the road. As Alexis grapples with this bewildering loss, and deals with the FBI, Austin’s prickly family, and her colleagues at the hospital, Alexis uncovers a series of strange lies that force her to wonder: Where did Austin go? Why did he really bring her to Vietnam? And how much danger has he left her in? Set amidst the adrenaline-fueled world of the emergency room, The Red Lotus is a global thriller about those who dedicate their lives to saving people, and those who peddle death to the highest bidder.

Chris Bohjalian is one of my very favorite authors. He writes wonderfully and yet is the most humble person in real life. I was excited to snag his latest from Net Galley. This was a suspenseful thriller and I think it would make an awesome movie. I couldn’t put it down. It was rather sad in parts, because one of Bohjalian’s gifts as a writer is to make the story realistic. The characters stayed with me long after I was done reading.

Thank you, Doubleday, for my ARC! This novel publishes on 3/17.

Just a note: I read this a few months back, well before the corona virus was headlining everywhere. This story involves what I’ll call “illness and epidemic”, so just putting that out there as a trigger given the current situation.