Book I Read in April

I feel like I hardly ever get a chance to read, so I'm shocking myself with the ability to even keep up with one book a month!

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Serena Frome is a 20-something woman in London in the 1970's (how perfectly does this book cover depict that?!) who goes to work for MI5, which is a British intelligence agency.  She can technically be classified as a "spy," though she would be considered quite a lowly one, and this book focuses mainly on just one of her assignments, which ends up impacting her life significantly.

Reading the back cover of this book, I fully expected it to be this epic spy novel with twists and turns and a couple of shoot outs, but I should have known better having read a few of McEwan's other novels (Atonement, On Chesil Beach).  This story is much quieter, and much more of a story of Serena's life as a regular civilian intersecting with her life as an intelligence agent.  There are events and things that happen to her that end up being not at all as they seem (and one somewhat major revelation/twist), but it's nothing that's going to end the world or cause a terrorist to get away.  This is a story about a woman who is a spy, rather than spy story.

This was one of those books that I couldn't tell if I liked it as I was reading it, but every time I put it down, I continued to think about it.  Because of that, I'm going to call this a solid "like," though not a quite a "love," and I continue to be a fan of McEwan in general (if you haven't read Atonement, I encourage you to do so at your earliest possible convenience).