Marvel's Black Widow: Forever Red

Howdy folks


Well, after the heart-wrenching true story of Ashley's War, I felt like I needed a palate cleanser. I thought I'd get back to the roots of the blog, reviewing YA action-adventure, and no one serves up action or adventure better than Marvel. Add to that Margaret Stohl's Black Widow: Forever Red has garnered some buzz on some of the other blogs I visit, and services a character that is criminally underused in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (how did we get Ant-Man before a Black Widow standalone movie?) and I though it might be the cure for what ailed me.

I have to say, it was not.

A brief plot summary: Eight years ago, during a mission to cross off the Russian madman who turned her from a regular preteen to one of the worlds most deadly assassins, SHIELD Agent Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow) rescues a young girl named Ava Orlova, then promptly dumps her in SHIELD custody and disappears from her life. Ava runs away and ends up living in the basement of a YMCA in Brooklyn, a big chip on her shoulder with regards to both SHIELD and the mysterious woman who rescued and then abandoned her. But the mad Russian scientist behind the infamous Red Room isn't is dead as Natasha thought, and she soon reappears in Ava's life...as does the mysterious boy Ava sees on her dreams.

I'm not saying it's a bad book. It's deeply flawed, to be sure. I'll get to that in a moment. But I think a lot of my disappointment may have been due to my expectations. First off, my view of the Marvel Universe is shaped overwhelmingly by the movie and TV side of it. I've read a few of the comics, but follow the MCU religiously. And some of the other Marvel characters in the book are good approximations of their MCU counterparts. Stohl's Tony Stark is the same wisecracking rogue we've come to know and love, and she especially captures Phil Coulson's deadpan wit. (Side note: Actor Clark Gregg does not get enough credit for turning a bit character in a small independent studio movie into a lynchpin of one of the biggest movie franchises in history).

The one character I found off was Natasha herself. In the movies she's not just an ass-kicking badass, but often has a breezy, sassy air to her and she is perhaps the most empathetic of the Avengers. I found Forever Red's Natasha to be a cold, unfeeling robot for much of the book, and if she feels any emotion it's usually brooding. This might be more true to the comics, I can't say for sure.

The book's fatal flaw, however, is how it handles foreshadowing. There are, in my humble opinion, right ways and wrong ways to handle the foreshadowing of a major character death. Ashley's War did an outstanding job of that, making the foreshadowing so imperceptible at first that you couldn't even put your finger on why you starting feeling this sense of dread. Even within the MCU, there's a good recent example, where the promos for the last few episodes of Season 3 of Agents of SHIELD blared that someone would die, and a flash-forward scene revealed that a necklace would be part of that death. Then in the last two episodes the necklace went from character to character among the show's large cast, always keeping you guessing who it would be. Forever Red goes about this the completely wrong way, telegraphing a death at the end of the book from the very begining (this is done by starting every chapter with excerpts from a SHIELD Line of Duty Death inquiry). As there are only three main characters, and one of them is Black Widow, you have a 50/50 chance of guessing who it will be, and it's not really hard to tell which one of them will bite it in the end. In doing this, the book effectively neuters itself, removing any tension or drama that might otherwise have been present.

The other problem, and this is inherent to all the other standalone MCU movies, is why, if you have a large roster of super-powered friends to call upon in times of need, would you not do that? The book makes the flimsiest of excuses for that, and at one point near the finale, Natasha is even on the phone with Tony Stark, and you can't help but wonder if she's willing to call him for tech support, why wouldn't she just ask him to come over in his invincible flying suit and help her make short work of the Russian and his goons, without needlessly endangering the life of two teenage kids. It's understandable in the movies, they have limited budgets. But in a book, it threatens the suspension of disbelief, even in a universe populated with living Norse gods and giant green rage monsters.

So overall, it kept me entertained, but it failed to meet my high expectations.

-Mike, Out

Ashley's War

Howdy Folks!

Today I am breaking radio silence to bring you a story every American should know, but very few do. Perhaps it is very fitting that I do so over Independence Day weekend. 

I've been on a non-fiction kick for most of the year, listening to memiors from naval commanders past and present, and an inside look at the Military Working Dog program. Then I came across a book by journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon about a group of remarkable soldiers that almost no one in this country knows about. 

If it wasn't already clear, I'm a bit of a military history buff. I can name virtually every variant of aircraft employed by all five branches of the military, and know the name and hull number of half the ships in the Navy. But until I read a news article about this book, I had never heard of the Cultural Support Teams, a group of all-female soldiers who deploy to Afghanistan attached to Special Operations units, typically Army Ranger strike teams but they also work with Green Berets and Navy SEALs. I won't go into a great deal about them, I think you should let Lemmon tell you about them first hand, with all of the thousands of hours of travel and interviews she did to bring their stories to life. 

The Ashley the book's title refers to is Ashley White, a fresh-faced young 2nd Lieutenant in the North Carolina National Guard who, along with a hundred other women, answered the call for a new secret program being set up by Special Operations Command at the behest of no less that Admiral William McRaven himself (McRaven oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and had the CST's been operational at that time I have little doubt one would have accomanied the SEALs on that fateful mission). They are to accompany Spec Ops forces on raids into the lawless border regions of Afghanistan and fulfill a mission requirement only they, as women, can do: search and interrogate the women and children of rural Afghanistan, who are forbidden to speak to men not related to them. Only half of the women complete the grueling selection process at Fort Bragg, then they are rushed through an abbreviated training program and quickly deployed to some of the hottest spots in Afghanistan, where the information they could provide is desperately needed to combat a resurgent Taliban and their associated Al-Qaeda fighters.

We meet many remarkable women in this book, but the story centers on Ashley, who becomes a much beloved figure by her fellow CSTs, her  Afghan-American interpreter, and eventually the Rangers she fought alongside, not only for her extraordinary physical strength but her quiet professionalism and compassion. 

At first the book almost reads like a puff piece, an overly inspirational, hoo-rah tale of the underdogs who overcame prejudice and proved themselves worthy. But Lemmon is a skilled writer, and halfway through she infects the story with a very subtle, almost imperceptible sense of foreboding, and you ever so slowly get a feeling that this story may not have a happy ending. It slowly builds and builds, the tension in the narrative ratcheting up, churning your stomach as it leads up to an inevitable climax you can tell by then is coming and you'd give anything to avoid. But this is not a novel. These are real people and real events and the past cannot be changed.   

When the CST's were first deployed in 2011, the ban on women serving in direct combat operations was still in effect, but it was by then, especially for the CSTs, an exercise in semantics. That, more than anything else, is what led to the ban being dropped and all military occupations were opened to women. It was not out of political correctness or a social experiment, as so many detractors have said. The experiment was already conducted in the mountains of one of the most hostile and unforgiving places on Earth, and by all accounts it was a resounding success. These women proved once and for all they could integrate successfully with America's most elite male soldiers and fight along side them shoulder to shoulder. The weapons caches, insurgents, and booby-trapped IEDs they were able to find, with their unique capabilities, no doubt saved the lives of countless Coalition forces and innocent civilians. 

"I brought my daughter with me to show her women can be heroes too", says a stranger to a grieving mother at the funeral of her daughter. The mother's first inkling of what her daughter was really doing overseas did not come until it was an elite Army Ranger who met them at Dover Air Force Base as the first fallen CST made her long, final journey home, to tell them she would be afforded the same honors as the male Rangers who died alongside her. There are now several women's names inscribed on the Special Operations memorial wall at Fort Bragg, a testament to their sacrifice and a reminder to whoever the first female Special Operators end up being, that their new opportunities were paid for in blood.  

The fact that their story is almost wholly unknown probably doesn't bother the women of the Cultural Support Teams, as they embody the "Quiet Professional" that is the standard among Special Forces. But I think it's something every American should know. So check out Ashley's War, and learn all about this remarkable note in American history. 

-Mike, out.