The Sirens of Baghdad

With sincere-sounding feeling, Jason Collins delivers the story of a young man's quest to repudiate his homeland, war-ravaged Iraq. Collins creates distinctive personas for the novel's various male characters--in particular capturing the young protagonist's anger with society as well as his turmoil at finding himself displaced in the world. Somber, with a slightly angry edge, the story builds as the quiet youth is urged by a radical group to make a difference. Collins delivers his lines in an increasingly clipped and hard-bitten tone as the plot escalates. With his masterful delivery Collins propels the listener through an intense story. M.R. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

March 12, 2007
Khadra's latest political thriller set in the Middle East couldn't be more timely. The versatile Khadra brings the reader inside the mind of an unnamed terrorist-to-be, an Iraqi Bedouin, radicalized by witnessing the death of innocents and the humiliation of the civilian population by the American forces in the Second Gulf War. Without apologizing for the carnage caused by either side in the conflict, the author, a former officer in the Algerian army, manages to make the thoughts of a suicide bomber accessible to a Western readership, even as the scope of the terrorist's intended target, meant to dwarf 9/11 in its impact, and the method's plausibility will send a shiver down the spine of most readers. Despite the essential bleakness of the book's themes, Khadra (The Swallows of Kabul
; The Attack
) manages to inject a note of hope toward the end, without betraying his powerful message of how the occupation of Iraq has brutalized both the Iraqis and the Americans.