Bookworm: Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter
Thanks to the recommendation of a bibliophile friend, I have just finished Lea Carpenter’s book, Eleven Days. Wow. It’s a great one!
The book opens with a middle-class, hard working single mom, named Sara who “is no longer sure what she fills her days with” because her only son, Jason, a 27-year-old elite Navy SEAL team member, has gone missing while on a mission in Afghanistan the night of 2 May 2011 (which happens to be the same night of the historic Osama bin Laden raid). She was told by two officers that they have “a general idea of where he was, but that they could not tell her any more than that.” Ok, so how’s that for an opening zinger?
At its core, Eleven Days is the story of a mother and her son. It is concurrently a fascinating and engaging story about soldiers working in special operations teams and what motivates them. The novel cleverly weaves together the years of Jason’s training for the Navy SEALS with the excruciating days in which Sara waits for news of him.
Though Lea Carpenter is a first-time novelist, her resume clearly lays the foundation for greatness. She is a founding editor of the literary journal Zoetrope, worked for The Paris Review, earned an MBA from Harvard and worked for the New York Public Library. Oh, and she is a military daughter.
Hope that you enjoy this book as much as I did!