Cloud Girls by Lisa Harding

First published in Ireland in 2017; published by HarperVia on April 25, 2023

Cloud Girls is an account of sex trafficking told from the perspectives of two girls. It’s the kind of book that is likely intended to call attention to a social problem. While the novel might raise a reader’s awareness, it falls short of telling a compelling story.

Nicoleta Zanesti is from Moldova. Nico’s father sells her at the age of twelve, as soon as she has her first period. Her parents tell her that they have found her a husband, a wealthy man who will give her everything she wants, but it seems likely that her father knows (and her mother fears) the truth. Nico’s mother makes a timid show of resistance but she has been trained to defer to her husband. Her younger brother is too small to protect his sister.

Nico is the best student in her class, but the transfer of her ownership from father to “future husband” must be kept from school authorities who might interfere. Nico begins to suspect that she has been deceived when she learns that the man she expects to marry already has a wife. When the van in which she is riding picks up more girls, she realizes that marriage is not in the cards.

Samantha Harvey lives in Ireland. At fifteen, Sammy is sexually experienced, having been pimped out by her boyfriend to his friends. Sammy’s mother is a lush. To avoid returning home and to keep her friend Lucy out of trouble when they stay out all night, Sammy injures herself with a bottle to simulate a sexual assault. When the plan does not work as she expected, she flees from home and turns to alcohol and prostitution.

Eventually a woman in a brothel gives Sammy a phone number and she joins a prostitution ring with the expectation of being paid. Instead, she finds herself in a group of trafficked girls. Sammy is given drugs and condoms that men won’t wear and promises of eventual compensation, but she isn’t given freedom.

As a young virgin, Nico is viewed as a valuable commodity. She’s sold on to the Irish prostitution ring, a transaction that is only explained in the broadest terms. I suppose that makes sense since Nico is telling the story from her perspective and isn’t privy to how or why she’s destined to work in Ireland. In any event, Nico is put to work with Sammy and a few other girls. When Nico tries to run — not to escape, but just for the joy of running — the girls learn that leaving is not an option.

The plot follows an expected arc, taking the reader through a sanitized version of the lives of girls who are forced to have sex. The novel’s descriptions of sexual abuse are not graphic, but Lisa Harding makes clear that the girls are the victims of the men who use and abuse them in varying ways. Perhaps the censored portrayal of sexual encounters with children is an act of mercy or a sensible way to avoid any hint of prurience, but it also detracts from the story’s power. It may be for that reason that the narrative often comes across as a story that has been imagined rather than one that has been lived. The story’s conclusion splits the difference between an ending that is relatively comforting and one that is unresolved.

Sammy is surprised when she recognizes a couple of respected family men from Dublin at one of the gatherings where she is offered as entertainment. Much of the book consists of Sammy and Nico being disappointed that men do not live up to their expectations of decency. To some extent, this is a novel of innocence shattered.

Harding explains that the story is based on firsthand accounts of trafficked girls. In this case, reading the actual accounts might be better than reading fiction that filters the emotions of the trafficking victims through an author. Still, the novel creates a sense of what it must be like to be sold as an Eastern European child or to drift into a forced prostitution ring as a troubled Western European teen. The story tells an important truth and Nico and Sammy are, simply by virtue of their circumstances, sympathetic characters.

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The Days Before Us by Sejal Bandani

Published digitally by Amazon on April 27, 2023

This short story is part of the Amazon Original Stories series. Specifically, it is part of the Good Intentions collection, a series of stories about “motherly love” (or, in this case, questionable or misunderstood love).

Autumn is a mess. She feels that her mother abandoned her emotionally after her father left. Autumn has regularly received letters from her mother that she hasn’t opened. She won’t tell her husband why she refuses to open the letters, supposedly because she doesn’t know. Her husband has been patient but is drawing away from her for unexplored reasons that presumably extend beyond her failure to read her mail. He might take a job in a different city. He might not want to bring Autumn with him. As she’s about to confront that reality, Autumn realizes she’s pregnant. Well, of course she does, because that’s what happens in domestic dramas. How can Autumn come to understand her mother without becoming a prospective mother herself?

The story addresses Autumn’s internal drama. Surrounding her introspection are two aquatic adventures. In the first, she finds a young dolphin that has separated from its pod, a metaphor for Autumn’s isolated life. It isn’t a great metaphor because the dolphin wants to be part of a pod while Autumn deliberately distances herself from everyone except her friend Callista. Autumn tells Callista all the dark secrets she keeps from her husband. Why can’t she be just as open with her husband? Who knows?

The second adventure pits Autumn against nature when she encounters a storm while sailing alone. That episode is over before it can add dramatic tension to the story.

Instead, the tension is supposed to arise from Autumn's unresolved domestic issues. Will Autumn reconcile with her mother? Will her husband leave her? Will she tell her husband about her pregnancy? Will he change his mind about their seemingly doomed relationship if he learns about the pregnancy? Will a young dolphin teach Autumn that she doesn’t have to be alone?

Readers who care about the answers to such questions might enjoy this story. I regarded it as a humdrum example of domestic fiction. I’m not a fan of the genre so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but this story reminded me of the reasons I’m not a fan. A confrontation between mother and pregnant daughter (“you were the best part of me”) is excessively sentimental, as is Autumn’s heartfelt discussion with her husband in the final paragraphs. Autumn learns an obvious lesson but just in case the reader doesn’t get it, Sejal Bandani spells it out at the story’s end. The story is too sophisticated to be gag-worthy, but it’s entirely predictable.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on April 25, 2023

I’m not tech-savvy, so I didn’t know that the Red Team is a term used to identify people who try to exploit weaknesses in digital systems while the Blue Team tries to insulate systems from attack. And since I’m also not cryptocurrency savvy, I can’t say that I followed all the details in Red Team Blues. Explanations of blockchains and such seemed to make sense as I was reading them, but five minutes after I closed the book I was thinking, “I’ve got no idea what you just explained to me, Cory.” I don’t think that matters (although tech and crypto savvy people might salivate over the details) because the story is fundamentally about people and the impact that certain events have on their lives.

Martin Hench plays on the Red Team. He’s a good guy, not someone who uses hacking skills for criminal purposes. He typically sells his services to victims of digital crimes, helping them recover their losses in exchange for 25% of the recovery. Martin lives on a very fancy bus and often spends his nights in Walmart parking lots.

Martin’s old friend Danny Lazer is a billionaire who founded a company that provides the tools for the next internet revolution. Danny’s wife died, leaving him to wonder why he wasted so much of his life chasing a fortune when he could have been spending more time with his wife, working a couple of hours each month and earning enough to pay for a comfortable life in a Baja beach shack.

Danny eventually sold his company and started a new one. He married his much younger former personal assistant, Sethuramani. He’s chasing money again, this time with a new form of cryptocurrency. He started the company so he would have something to leave to Sethu, who is quite capable of managing it.

However, Danny is in trouble. He acquired “the signing keys for four of the most commonly deployed secure enclaves.” I won’t try to explain what that means because, although Doctorow explained it in simple terms, my simple mind can only wrap around the simplest part of the explanation. Suffice it to say that, in the wrong hands, the keys to secure enclaves can be used to wipe out records of digital transactions and destroy the foundational trustworthiness of companies that use them. So naturally, someone stole the keys, threatening to bring down Danny’s new company and quite a few other companies, as well.

Martin earns three hundred million dollars by recovering the laptop that contains the keys, using techniques that Doctorow carefully explained and that I vaguely grasped. I didn’t quite buy the location from which the missing laptop is recovered (it depends on an innate trust in human nature that I wouldn’t expect to find in thieves), but that’s not an integral part of the story.

Martin’s digital detective work leads him to some dead bodies that are an integral part of the story. The father of one of the dead kids is seeking vengeance. Martin had nothing to do with the deaths, but be becomes a target. He can either use his wealth to skip the country and hide quietly until he dies, or he can incite a war among groups of very nasty people who depend on lawyers and technology to hide their money. He opts for starting the war, then ducks out of the way.

Much of the story (the part I understood and thus found interesting) follows Martin as he tries to hide from and ultimately thwart the criminals who want to kill him. To that end, he shuts off his phone and stays away from his fortune so he can’t be traced. He lives as a homeless man for a few days, opening his eyes to the people he used to look away from. Martin is a decent human to everyone he encounters (unless they’re trying to kill him) and is surprised by how less fortunate people reward his decency with kindness. Maybe the story is a little too hopeful in that regard, but in a country where we are constantly told that “those other people” are out to harm us, it’s good to remember that many of “those other people” are just like us.

Doctorow emphasizes the environmental damage caused by the servers that “mine” cryptocurrency and the nefarious uses (including money laundering and tax evasion) to which cryptocurrencies are put. Doctorow’s law enforcement agents (Homeland Security in a turf war with Treasury) are credible, in that they prefer a “harm management” approach to actual law enforcement. Keep the violence offshore, let the rich shelter their money and avoid taxes, and everyone stays happy. When Martin throws a wrench into the works, bringing some of the violence into America’s borders, I suspect that most readers will agree that he’s doing the right thing, even if the strategy risks collateral damage.

The novel is marketed as a thriller, but it is not the kind of story that depends on chases and fights to get the reader's juices flowing. The violence occurs offstage. Martin sets events in motion with his mind and keyboard rather than his fists. In the meantime, he has to confront the isolation caused by his lifestyle (most potential sex partners don't want to overnight on a bus) and decide whether it makes sense to reject a woman he admires when she is willing to let him into her heart.

Doctorow is an interesting writer but an even more interesting person. He refuses to attach Amazon’s Digital Rights Management technology to his audiobooks, so Amazon refuses to sell the audio versions. Doctorow has principled reasons for resisting Amazon’s DRM technology, so he produces and markets his own audiobooks. I’m not into audiobooks but I applaud Doctorow for standing up to Amazon.

This is the first novel in a trilogy. It does not depend on a cliffhanger to induce readers to buy the next book. The quality of Red Team Blues is reason enough to look forward to the next one.

RECOMMENDED

Moscow Exile by John Lawton

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on April 18, 2023

About twenty years have passed since 1948, when Joe Wilderness was selling black market coffee in East Germany. Some of that backstory is told in Hammer to Fall. That novel ended in a cliffhanger as Wilderness is shot on a bridge during a prisoner exchange in 1968.

Moscow Exile does not take up the story where Hammer to Fall left off. In fact, more than two hundred pages pass before Wilderness reappears. Moscow in Exile seems to meander but the story’s arc is purposeful. A circuitous path is sometimes the best route to an intended destination. Decades pass in the lives of characters both critical and collateral before their significance to the plot becomes apparent.

We meet the former Charlotte Young after she marries Hubert Mawer-Churchill. She leaves him when she falls for Avery Shumacher, but Hubert’s cousin Winston doesn’t blame her. He gives her a job in Naval Intelligence because of her ability to speak Russian. The job pleases her handlers; Charlotte is a Russian spy.

Charlotte goes by Coky after she marries Avery. He happens to be a wealthy American who is serving as Roosevelt’s eyes and ears in England. She moves to Washington D.C. with Avery when the war ends. After Avery’s unfortunate death, Coky marries Senator Redmaine, an early anti-communist crusader in the style of McCarthy. Coky detests the man but she’s following Moscow’s orders.

The other character of significance in the early going is Charlie Leigh-Hunt. Charlie is also spying for Russia, not so much for ideological reasons but because Moscow’s payments enhance his lifestyle. Charlie’s job, on the other hand, is to spy for MI6. He’s a bit worried because Burgess and McLean have been caught and Philby is on MI6’s radar. He’s shipped to Washington to replace Philby as head of station, the trusting British replacing one Russian spy with another. The CIA is less trusting.

On the voyage across the Atlantic, Charlie sleeps with Coky, having no idea who she is. He later discovers that she’s his new boss. or at least the conduit to his boss on the Russian side. All the more reason to sleep with her again, a practice he continues regularly. When the time comes to scamper to Russia, Charlie’s lifestyle becomes less indulgent, but the KGB officer in charge of him is attractive so he’s able to resume sleeping with the boss.

All of that is an absorbing background story that John Lawton spends half the novel telling. The balance of the story begins with Wilderness waking up in a hospital, having been shot at the end of the last novel. We learn that Wilderness is on a mission. The Russians treat him as a spy and potential defector after he’s taken to Moscow. The Russians don’t want him meeting with Charlie but it is a foregone conclusion that they will meet and share their secrets. The question is whether Wilderness will be able to make his way back to America.

Many of the secondary characters from the last novel resurface, including a British ambassador who would rather be raising pigs, a CIA agent who resembles a pig, and a couple of women who are far more competent than the men they replace. The story eventually circles back to Coky, tying all the plot threads together. There’s even another prisoner exchange on a bridge. What fun would a spy novel be without one?

Lawton has become one of my favorite modern spy novelists. His plots are realistic in that nothing ever goes according to plan. His characters are intelligent but flawed and for that reason interesting. His prose is a mixture of polished literary style and “Bob’s your uncle” colloquialisms. London, Moscow, and Washington D.C. are all described in atmospheric detail without bogging down the story. The plot builds tension after it comes into focus, but Lawton doesn’t depend on fight scenes or on-page violence to keep the story moving. I don’t know whether this novel brings an end to the Joe Wilderness series, but I look forward to reading whatever Lawton writes next.

RECOMMENDED

Salvage this World by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown and Company on April 25, 2023

There’s nothing for the people of coastal Mississippi and Louisiana but hurricanes, storms, and floods. No crops. No jobs. No hope. This is the kind of landscape that Michael Farris Smith was born to chronicle.

Jessie’s mother died in childbirth. Her father Wade tells himself he did his best to raise her but he knows he didn’t. He spent too much time in the bottle, too little time trying to overcome his demons, self-pity first among them.

Jessie was not yet eighteen when Holt came into her life. Wade didn’t like Holt but he was powerless to stop Jessie when she jumped into his pickup and left Wade behind. Holt has physical and emotional scars from an abusive childhood but he cares about Jessie and the child they conceive.

Before meeting Jessie, Holt worked for the Temple of Pain and Glory, a tent revival that uses “hellfire and damnation” to camouflage “a more pure theology of greed and dread and lust.” Elser assures her audiences that a young girl with the power to control the weather has been sent by God to save them from hurricanes. Holt stole money and a ring of mysterious keys from the Temple and fled. He only tells Jessie that he is on the run when she is pregnant with his child.

After Holt tells Jessie the truth, he instructs her to grab the keys and run if bad people come. When an unfamiliar car comes up the driveway, that’s what she does, carrying her son Jace into the woods. She steals a car and soon realizes that the foul stench in the back is caused by a decaying corpse. Eventually she makes her way back to Wade because she has nowhere else to go.

The disparate pieces of the plot are adhered by happenstance, but each is a pleasure to read. We eventually learn why there is a body in the car that Jessie steals. The story ends in an ambiguous revelation as the reader gets a horrific glimpse of the secret that the keys unlock. The ambiguity might put off some readers, but the mood and the way characters react to their struggles is more important than understanding why events unfold as they do.

For Wade, Salvage this World is a story of redemption. He is old and alone, but he is given one last chance to set aside his mistakes, salvage the most important part of his life, and be the kind of father or grandfather his family needs, if only for a moment. For Jessie and Holt, the story is largely a fight to survive. They both have opportunities to remake their lives — slender opportunities, given their pasts and the land in which they live — but they must confront the evil that pursues them before they can think about moving ahead.

Smith scatters grit into every sentence. His prose is powerful, stark and evocative. The story’s darkness is echoed in scenes of violence or dread that unfold in tunnels or back woods at night, in religious beliefs that will not withstand the scrutiny of sunshine. Because the novel has few characters, Smith has room to develop themes of alienation and reluctant decency and survival in a hostile land through the backstories of secondary characters. Old men refuse to evacuate during hurricane warnings because a stubborn connection to their place in the world is stronger than their fear that the government might be right about something. Friends feel an obligation to help each other but they would rather not. Poverty and child abuse exist because they are part of a cycle that people are powerless to break.

Smith builds the tension of a thriller into a story of desperate lives. Characters salvage what they can in this novel, both literally and figuratively. For all the darkness, the story offers a glimmer of hope that relationships can be salvaged, that a grandchild born into a stormy world might grow up to have a sunnier life than their parents or grandparents. Still, Smith leaves the impression that they'll need to escape the land of tent revivals if they want to give themselves a chance.

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