Ari Bookzilla

This book...I can't even.It's pretty heavy, the subject of it. It's certainly different than anything I've read before. It made me feel for the heroine so much.The blurb is pretty vague, so I'm going to tell you what it's about (no spoilers or anything about how the story unfolds).Hunter is an American soldier in Iraq, 2003. He gets severely wounded in a street shootout. Rania is an Iraqi prostitute. She saves him, and hides him.And it's somehow heartwrenching. I mean, you have this woman who has never known anything resembling happiness or love, and this man that literally has nothing of his own but a weapon. They don't make sense, at all, but then somehow they make perfect sense.It was horrible reading about Rania's life. She deserves so much better, but she has absolutely no choice. She is so strong! I wanted to just make every bad thing in her life go away.It was horrible reading about Hunter knowing what she did and that she was doing it partly for him. His guilt over it, his disgust and then his jealousy, they were killing me. I loved Hunter, all of his thoughts seemed so realistic somehow, even the errant ones.If it weren't for the strange circumstances, I'd say that the way they get together was reminiscent of a real couple. The camaraderie, the shyness, the protectiveness, the way they slowly ease into it without even realizing. But they were strange circumstances, and that makes the story even stronger because there are things between them that are so hard to get over. Everything that happened made sense, especially the way it ended. I loved the way he didn't care about any of it, just her. And that she trusted him enough to let him take care of her.And then, when they are finally together - I can't even call them sex scenes. I'm talking that first time, but it was every.single.time. I can honestly say that, for the first time in my life I felt...not embarrassed, but uncomfortable, reading a sex scene in a book. I read this stuff several times a week. It makes no sense that I should feel uncomfortable. But it felt so wrong to witness that kind of pure intimacy, even on paper. Seriously, that's what it was. They have this special connection, you can feel it and it was so intimate it felt wrong to be reading it.I guess it's a testimony to Jasinda Wilder's writing. You can make a clear distinction between Rania and Hunter's voices. I loved the way Hunter switched to Marine mode, his voice changed, too. Or how Rania sounded detached every time she was Sabah. It was great. The sex is very graphic. Just a heads up for those who don't like that sort of thing.I thought it would be hard reading about war, and yeah, it's a considerable part of this story, but it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I definitely recommend this.