Waiting for Eden

April 1, 2018

Ackerman knows war, as evidenced by his highly praised Green on Blue and National Book Award finalist Dark at the Crossing; he served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and now covers the Syrian conflagration from Istanbul. Here he portrays war's aftermath as veteran Eden Malcom lies speechless and immobilized in a hospital bed. Wife Mary sits by daily, but one Christmas when she is gone, Eden's consciousness glimmers forth.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2018
Wounded terribly in Iraq three years ago, a soldier awaits his death in a burn center in San Antonio, and we learn of his fate through a surprising, unconventional, and risky narrative strategy.Eden is the soldier who just barely survived when his Humvee hit a pressure plate in the Hamrin Valley, and the narrator is a fellow soldier who was killed in the same explosion--and who considers Eden's fate worse than his own. Because the narrator is dead, he is granted a kind of omniscience that would be denied someone living; for example, he has access to what passes through Eden's mind even as Eden is immobilized and practically catatonic. We learn that he and Eden had been friends in the service, had taken some of the same special training, and had been deployed together. Through a series of flashbacks we also learn of the narrator's attraction to Eden's wife, Mary, who in the present is grieving over Eden's hopelessly burned body and is worried about exposing her 3-year-old daughter to Eden's insentience. Mary is faced with the morally difficult decision of whether or not to release Eden from his suffering, a strategy urged on her by Gabe, a gruff but caring nurse. Ackerman skillfully weaves his story across chapters that alternate between the grim reality of the burn center and Eden's more robust past, where we discover that he and Mary had difficulty conceiving a child, a tension exacerbated by the narrator's growing attraction to Mary. We're informed that Mary and the narrator inhabit a "space that is empty and white, waiting for [Eden]....We both wonder what will happen to us when he finally goes." The poignancy arises out of the fact that they both love Eden in their own way.An affecting, spare, and unusual novel.

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Starred review from July 30, 2018
A National Book Award finalist for Dark at the Crossing, former Marine Ackerman tells the heartbreaking story of a relationship caught up in the aftermath of war. Eden and Mary are happily married with a child on the way when Eden is deployed for his second tour in Iraq. After an accident leaves Eden’s best friend dead and Eden barely alive, he returns home on a stretcher covered in severe burns and is unable to return to the life he’d led before. Mary, meanwhile, cares for their infant daughter and must wrestle with the hard decision of whether to take Eden off of life support. She is full of resentment and guilt, unable to forgive herself for letting him leave for war. Eden’s best friend narrates—caught in limbo between this world and the next—and hovers over their lives, connecting to both in unexpected ways. He offers a bird’s-eye view of the pain and suffering of both Mary and Eden as they struggle separately to make peace with Eden’s imminent death. This is a deeply touching exploration of resentment, longing, and loss among those who volunteer to fight and the loved ones left behind.

Starred review from August 1, 2018
In this gorgeously constructed short novel, Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing, 2017) focuses on a marriage between a soldier, Eden Malcolm, and his wife, Mary. In taut, detached prose that is rich in symbolism, the novel begins with Eden's dramatic return from Iraq, where he has been injured beyond all recognition. Mary comes immediately to his side, heavily pregnant. The scene of much of the novel is the San Antonio burn unit in which Eden resides. In short sections that flit between Eden before the explosion and his existence after, Ackerman, in a mysterious narrative voice, describes how Mary navigates grief, loss, motherhood, and what it means to be married to someone barely alive. Both Eden's and Mary's fears and foibles are richly explored to create a deeply moving portrayal of how grief can begin even while our loved ones still cling to life. In this unique Afghanistan and Iraq Wars novel, which joins a growing genre that includes Kevin Powers' Yellow Birds? (2012) and Phil Klay's Redeployment (2014), Ackerman's focus on a single family makes the costs of war heartbreakingly clear, as does his drawing emotion and import from the smallest of acts with incredible skill. Many will read this wonderful novel in a single sitting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)