And West Is West

August 10, 2015
This compelling debut novel, which won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, dramatically examines the insidious role unrestrained technology plays in the moral and ethical corruption of people, institutions, and government. This is a sobering story of two people who never meet but are connected in a corrupt world, futilely hoping the corruption won’t affect them. U.S. Air Force Sgt. Jessica Aldridge is a drone pilot flying missions over Afghanistan and Pakistan from 8,000 miles away. When she questions the order for a drone strike on suspected terrorists and later reveals her guilt when the missile hits the wrong people, she is disgraced and summarily discharged. To cover up the drone program and silence Jessica, the government sends the FBI after her, so she goes underground. In New York City, analyst Ethan Winter works for a large international bank creating currency trading algorithms that cash in on volatility related to terrorism. His number crunching makes millions of dollars for the bank with each car bomb and suicide attack. Then someone sabotages his algorithms, and the bank loses a fortune and fires him. The system crushes both Ethan and Jessica, but Ethan finally understands what else is happening at the bank, and Jessica discovers the truth about the botched drone strike, both connected cleverly. This is an excellent story, well told, suspenseful, and tragic.

August 1, 2015
Award-winning novel from a first-time author. Ethan Winter works for a Wall Street bank. Jessica Aldridge is an Air Force sergeant based in Nevada. What unites them is the war on terror. Ethan has developed an algorithm that allows his employer and their clients to profit from market fluctuations caused by anti-terrorist activities. As a drone pilot, Jessica launches missiles at suspected terrorists in the Middle East. Technological innovation has given them both power over the lives of others that would have been unimaginable in the not-too-distant past; however, neither Ethan nor Jessica is a figure of authority in the hierarchies in which they operate, and both prove to be expendable. Childress has the makings of a thriller here, but he clearly has other aims. The winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, this novel is devoid of anything that even approaches entertainment-and that includes drama and emotional impact. The narrative follows Ethan and Jessica after they're cut adrift from the institutions in which they had planned to spend their lives, but the crises that serve as catalysts happen so early in the story that the reader has little sense of what it is, really, that these protagonists are losing and little reason to care. Major events happen offstage, and scenes that should be crackling with tension-such as Ethan's firing and Jessica's discharge-are strangely bloodless. Childress' characters succeed neither as abstract symbols nor as actual people. Ethan and Jessica may be victims of systems of corruption, but they're also victims of their own dumb mistakes; they're screw-ups, not martyrs. Socially engaged but otherwise unengaging.

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October 1, 2015
This winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (created by Barbara Kingsolver) combines elements of technological sophistication in both drone warfare and financial manipulation with the hip social whirl of New York and Washington. Until being discharged, Jessica Aldridge, from her Nevada base, flies drones in Afghanistan with remarkable, if tragic, success; her father, Don, is in prison in Seminole City, Florida. Ethan Winter, also recently fired, developed and employed an algorithm linking terrorist activity around the world to financial cycles, a money-making (or -losing) phenomenon for his employers. His girlfriend, Zoe, is, it turns out, neither what she appears nor what she believes herself to be. After leaving the military, Jessica embarks on a cross-country trek, chased by two FBI agents, Daugherty and Pyle, and in the course of which she is aided by a team of dying tattoo artists. Though managing all these plot strains ultimately gets a little unwieldy, for most of the way Childress manages to keep our interest while maintaining a lightly handled political posture. Character-driven thriller fans may enjoy this more than general-fiction readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2015

This strong first novel intermingles the stories of three people starting over after failures for which they were not to blame. Ethan is a Wall Street quant whose career is destroyed as a result of a misplaced decimal point in his code and a coworker's treachery. Jessica is a drone pilot discharged from the air force after a failed mission to take out a terrorist leader. In contrast, Ethan's friend (and sometimes girlfriend) Zoe is undone, not by technology, but by learning the truth of her parentage and by her disastrous affair with her boss. After Zoe drowns--possibly an accident, possibly a suicide--the emotionally distraught Ethan is driven to take her ashes to the father she never knew, who's serving time in a Florida prison for murder. Jessica, meanwhile, struggles with the aftermath of her discharge while eluding a pair of FBI agents on an assignment to make sure she doesn't take her knowledge of the failed drone strike to the press. VERDICT Winner of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, this powerful and morally chilling tale depicts the chasm modern technology can create between actions and consequences--and the effects that has on the individuals carrying out the actions. [See Prepub Alert, 4/6/15.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015

Winner of the 2014 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, this first novel confronts the dangers of the new technology through two characters facing moral quandary as they do their jobs. Ordered to launch a preemptive strike against a suspected terrorist attack far, far away, air force drone pilot Jessica is devastated to realize that women and children are in her crosshairs, and Wall Streeter Ethan devises an algorithm that allows his company to make big bucks from the worldwide instability caused by terrorist-antiterrorist clashes.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.