(Reviewed by JD Jung)
#CommissionsEarned
“She kept coming back to the question of what to do with her life. Most people sorted that out in their twenties and thirties. What was wrong with her?”
Yana Pickering is over fifty years of age, divorced, with grown children and content with her life in Seattle. However, she is continually seeking purpose and worries about the plight of others.
Emma, a transgender attorney in the same city discovers that someone is trying to frame her.
Elias, the head of surgery at a hospital in Aleppo, Syria finds his life in upheaval. His apartment was bombed, his wife killed, and he loses contact with his teenage daughter Kamar and son Victor. The two children are forced to flee to Lebanon alone where, as Syrian refugees, their lives are in continual danger.
How their lives intertwine and how their circumstances play out is the plot of The Risk in Crossing Borders. Most of these borders are physical and require acts of actual survival, but some are mental and emotional.
While this story has multiple protagonists and loosely related subplots, it is well structured. We feel for each of the characters and the situations they are in. However, I feel that the struggles in Emma’s life could have been another book in itself. While still tense, the chapters in Seattle give a welcome emotional relief to what the two teenagers must endure in Syria and Lebanon. One issue that particularly stuck with me was how noble causes can be hijacked for other purposes.
This fast-paced novel will keep readers engaged from beginning to end. The Risk in Crossing Borders will also remind readers of the plight of political and social refugees around the world.
