Read This!: Sweet Tooth

By Ian McEwan

Book challenge: Red Cover

Keeping up with my spy-themed streak (seeing Argo, reading The Deception of the Emerald Ring), I decided to read Sweet Tooth which I got for Christmas.  This was my first Ian McEwan book.

Serena Frome, a maths student (like me!) from Cambridge (not like me!) finds herself working for the MI5 in 1970s London.  Because she is a woman (oh sexism), she is at the bottom of the barrel without much hope of rising up the ranks until she is assigned to a mission code-named Sweet Tooth.  The objective: have the Secret Service fund writers that they think share their ideals so that those ideals get into the heads of the general public through magazines, novels, and so on.  The writers of course aren't aware that the MI5 is behind their cash flow. Serena is assigned to a writer with whom she begins an affair.  As their relationship grows, Serena is torn between revealing who she is and keeping the secret her job requires.

Now, a lot of this book was a bit wordy and it got bogged down in the politics of the IRA and Cold War in places.  When I say bogged down, I mean it talked about it for more than one sentence.  This is one of my issues with male writers, the over talking about things that don't really matter that much to the story.  At least in the story I want to read (which is one not about politics and other snooze fest type topics).  Anyways, so I was chugging along reading it, learning about Serena's early life and time at university, and her entry into MI5.  Then, it moved on to the Sweet Tooth mission and things picked up.  I was going along wondering how this was all going to end when I hit the last part of the book.

SPOILER!!!!!!

Clever clever Mr. McEwan.  So it IS NOT Serena telling the story but Haley!  I didn't guess it and that was a good twist.  It actually made me really like the book.

END SPOILER!!!

So all in all, I recommend.