Book Review: Loose Lips by Claire Berlinski

Title: Loose Lips
Author: Claire Berlinski
Date Published: June 2004
Series: N/A

Rating :3 stars
Genre: Contemporary Romance/Adventure
ISBN:0-8129-6709-7

Blurb

After sending her résumé to the CIA on a whim, New Yorker Selena Keller is contacted by an Agency recruiter, who asks her how she would feel about convincing another human being to commit treason. Despite her checkered past, Selena passes the background investigation and a battery of bizarre aptitude tests. Living under cover as a government budget analyst, she begins her education in espionage at the Farm, the CIA’s covert facility. All CIA officers must survive a demanding training program, and it is there that Selena becomes romantically involved with Stan, a brilliant but darkly paranoid fellow student with presidential ambitions. What happens next is a fascinating inside portrait of the Agency—how spies are recruited, how they are trained, who they meet, where they go, and most important . . . what happens when they fall in love, and begin spying on one another.

My thought

Loose Lips provides a fun, good read, but left me unsatisfied in many respects. Loose Lips is about Selena Keller, a recent graduate with her doctorate in Sanskrit. She is facing a life in academia, probably at an obscure Midwestern college, when, on a lark, she applies for a job at the CIA. She is quickly interviewed, tested, grilled, and hired. 

The majority of the book describes her experiences in training to be a case officer. The quality of this book comes from its detail of the inner workings of the CIA and from Berlinski's use of language. Main characters are well-sketched, but ancillary characters are sometimes lightly brushed over. 

Be aware that the novel never shows the main character in the field or as a spy. This is more a novel about the rigors of penetrating, understanding, and assimilating to CIA culture.

This book is able to bring you in quickly and keeps you hanging until the very end. The end is such a big point that some will hate how it all ends up and some will love it. It tells you things about that you probably never knew or would have never even thought of.. The way Claire Berlinski describes the whole ordeal you would think that she actualy went through the training and experience herself.

Not a great book, not a bad book. The premise was strong and it captured my attention almost immediately. Just the ending could have been stronger.