be safe I love you by Cara Hoffman

I have read scores of reviews on this book. The one thing that resonated with me was that if it this book is  reviewed, it will spoil everything for the reader.  I personally feel that reviews are for the reader that has finished the book. We need to find common ground with others who will write a frame of what the book is about but will also give answers to clues the reader missed. Reviews are not for pre-reading.  The back of the book or the blurb inside the dust jacket cover is enough beforehand,. 

I will give this book one of my rare five stars, please go buy it now and tell me how you feel when you are finished... hurry!  Call me at two in the morning,  I don't care, I will get right up to talk about this book with you.

Cara Hoffman is a wonderfully, brutally strong no fuss author. She weaves a story about a young woman, Lauren Clay,  returning home from Iraq. A soldier that has changed. A soldier that has to come back to the mundane after atrocity,  and a soldier in a previous life that was going to go to a prestigious music school for her exceptional singing. Unfortunately, when the foreclosure notices on her father's home start rolling in she has to find a way to make money, as her father is unfit to do so. And there's Danny. Her little brother whom the reader will come to adore. He is not like other boys. Lauren took him under her wing and was forced to teach him about life,  all alone, without any parental love or guidance.

Once home Lauren finds that she is not only a "beloved" member of her community but also someone who has returned without her spirit, but only she knows this, and can feel that others are not catching on. My favorite lines from the book are-

She'd come home to a world of fragile baby animals. Soft inarticulate wide-eyed morons with know-nothing epiphanies and none of them-not one of them-did what she said,, which was beginning to grate on her, cut to the heart of how wrong things were. 

-because she is broken and as the story progresses, the reader can feel the palpable irritation, impatience, and  violence that is stirring in her. 

There isn't much written about women who come back from their deployments and there isn't much about these women who return with PTSD as much as you may find with men, and even that can be a rare research success. Cara Hoffman paints a mural of what Lauren is enduring but as you watch the artist painting, you do not know what the outcome may be.

Lauren teaches Danny about survival and takes off with him to Canada to meet up with a soldier friend that falls under a mysterious context. They stop for a time at a unheated cabin resting in the snowy mountains and from there we see Lauren through Danny's eyes. 

The best part of the book, I feel.

In the dance between Lauren and her brother, I  had to shut my eyes to the blistering honesty that Hoffman so beautifully writes. It's almost eloquence in the face of what Lauren and Danny must endure.

I will leave it there. There are poignant characters in this book that are focused on and used in this story without the added "walk on" or space filler characters to paint the story. 

Find a friend to read with. Also, make sure you read the interview with Hoffman in the back of the book. Her thoughts on war, women in war, propaganda as well as other controversial issues are so stark and honest that it is almost like reading a story in itself. Don't miss it. 

Buy it.

~excuse my lack of editing, very tired after staying up reading another good book which makes that okay, right?! Right!~