After seeing trailers for the just-released motion picture starring Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton and learning that it's based on a book of the same name, my husband decided to give the book - the first in a trilogy - a try. Then he told me it was very, very good.
Whether or not we watch movie remains to be seen (pun intended), but I knew I wanted to read the book first. I also knew it's close to 600 pages - not easy to fit into a stack of advance-copy books I've agreed to read and review. But make time I did, and I'm ever so glad. It's one of the best spy thrillers I've read in a very long time.
At first blush, the story seemed reminiscent of the TV show "The Americans" starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys; spies and counterspies, each trying to recruit others while remaining "black" (i.e., undetected and unidentified). Main characters Nathaniel Nash is a young CIA officer, assigned as the handler of a top-level Russian undercover U.S. spy; Dominika Egorova is a wounded (both physically and mentally) former Russian ballerina who stays on her toes under the watchful eye of her powerful uncle. But when her uncle sends her to "Sparrow School" - euphemism for a place females learn the art of seduction for the purpose of recruiting spies for the Russian government, her love of her home country under the dastardly Vladimir Putin and his loyal minions turns sour.
Needless to say, Nate and Dominika are brought together to serve cross purposes; he to recruit her, she to recruit him. And needless to say, it doesn't quite work out that way. It does, though, make for an intricately woven, hard-to-put-down story interlaced with tricks of the spy trade, twists and surprises - none of which, alas, I can describe without spoiling the book for other readers.
I can, however, is highly recommend this book - and I do. Outstanding!
Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews (Scribner, June 2013); 577 pp.
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