Review by WACHARO -- Escape by Belle Ami
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WACHARO
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- Latest Review: "Escape" by Belle Ami
Review by WACHARO -- Escape by Belle Ami
[Following is a volunteer review of "Escape" by Belle Ami.]
3 out of 4 stars
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Escape is the story of Cyrus Hassani and Layla Wallace escape from Iran. Cyrus is a deep cover Mossad mole working in Tehran, Iran as an Assistant to the Deputy Director of Oghab2 an espionage organization while Layla is an art history student at Harvard. Her father is a nuclear physicist at MIT and a Scott while her late mother was a Jew from Israel. They get together when Layla and Zamir her college boyfriend are kidnapped and taken to Evin Prison in Iran while on holiday in Dubai. Cyrus is sent by his boss to take Layla to a safe house before prison officers damage her, seduce her and coax all information she may know of importance to the establishment. He falls in love with Layla and finds himself sharing in confidence with her who he really was – a deep cover Mossad agent. They plan and execute their escape but before they could make it to the border of Iran, all borders are closed forcing Mossad back in Israel to change plans. When Layla loses hope of getting out alive, she convinces Cyrus to make love to her just for one night, breaking her promise to her dead mother of remaining a virgin till marriage. Mossad manages to snatch them out of Iran just in time and take them to Israel to begin their new lives. Layla, later learns she is pregnant with Cyrus’s child and tries to reach Cyrus with the news to no avail. They accidentally meet again and begin to date. The story ends with Cyrus meeting his daughter, Cerise, for the first time!
What I liked/disliked and why: The book is captivating, the romance does not get raunchy right from the beginning giving the reader some element of suspense hence interest in keeping on reading to get to know what happens in the end. The author seems to have done a good background research for the work and for these reasons, I would therefore rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. I would not give it a 2 because I enjoyed reading the book and could not put it down at some point and neither 4 because of the following reasons: the difficult vocabulary requires the reader to sometimes refer to the dictionary to get the meaning of the words thus interfering with the reading mood.
Secondly, at the beginning of the chapters lots of abbreviations are used which do not appear again at all in the last chapters. Thirdly, some of the time gaps in the episodes of the story are too big leaving the reader feeling frustrated for example: the time gap between Layla learning of her pregnancy from Dr. Steiner in Chapter 25 and the reader learning she has a 3 month old baby Cerise in Chapter 27. What happened in between? Finally, the real romance ends when it has just started! A 3-4 page epilogue would be interesting to let the reader know how Layla and Cyrus picked on their lives after Cyrus discovers he has a daughter.
Correct grammar is used throughout the book making the reading flow and enjoyable and the editing is quite professional save for one word “can’t’ on page 141 in the statement ‘I don’t think I can’t bear another minute on this…”. I did not encounter any typos in the book. The prologue however, does not reappear anywhere in the main chapters as is common in most books, unless I missed it. On ‘readers mode’ option of the PDF version which I downloaded, a number of sentences were jumbled up, difficult to follow unless one switches to ‘page’ or ‘continuous’ mode.
This book will mostly appeal to the learned or readers with some level of understanding of the English language and current knowledge of or history of the nuclear arms race. It will appeal least to the common reader with basic education with no knowledge of matters nuclear or an understanding of the history of Israel as a nation and the relationships between it, America and the Middle East countries.
******
Escape
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3 out of 4 stars
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Escape is the story of Cyrus Hassani and Layla Wallace escape from Iran. Cyrus is a deep cover Mossad mole working in Tehran, Iran as an Assistant to the Deputy Director of Oghab2 an espionage organization while Layla is an art history student at Harvard. Her father is a nuclear physicist at MIT and a Scott while her late mother was a Jew from Israel. They get together when Layla and Zamir her college boyfriend are kidnapped and taken to Evin Prison in Iran while on holiday in Dubai. Cyrus is sent by his boss to take Layla to a safe house before prison officers damage her, seduce her and coax all information she may know of importance to the establishment. He falls in love with Layla and finds himself sharing in confidence with her who he really was – a deep cover Mossad agent. They plan and execute their escape but before they could make it to the border of Iran, all borders are closed forcing Mossad back in Israel to change plans. When Layla loses hope of getting out alive, she convinces Cyrus to make love to her just for one night, breaking her promise to her dead mother of remaining a virgin till marriage. Mossad manages to snatch them out of Iran just in time and take them to Israel to begin their new lives. Layla, later learns she is pregnant with Cyrus’s child and tries to reach Cyrus with the news to no avail. They accidentally meet again and begin to date. The story ends with Cyrus meeting his daughter, Cerise, for the first time!
What I liked/disliked and why: The book is captivating, the romance does not get raunchy right from the beginning giving the reader some element of suspense hence interest in keeping on reading to get to know what happens in the end. The author seems to have done a good background research for the work and for these reasons, I would therefore rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. I would not give it a 2 because I enjoyed reading the book and could not put it down at some point and neither 4 because of the following reasons: the difficult vocabulary requires the reader to sometimes refer to the dictionary to get the meaning of the words thus interfering with the reading mood.
Secondly, at the beginning of the chapters lots of abbreviations are used which do not appear again at all in the last chapters. Thirdly, some of the time gaps in the episodes of the story are too big leaving the reader feeling frustrated for example: the time gap between Layla learning of her pregnancy from Dr. Steiner in Chapter 25 and the reader learning she has a 3 month old baby Cerise in Chapter 27. What happened in between? Finally, the real romance ends when it has just started! A 3-4 page epilogue would be interesting to let the reader know how Layla and Cyrus picked on their lives after Cyrus discovers he has a daughter.
Correct grammar is used throughout the book making the reading flow and enjoyable and the editing is quite professional save for one word “can’t’ on page 141 in the statement ‘I don’t think I can’t bear another minute on this…”. I did not encounter any typos in the book. The prologue however, does not reappear anywhere in the main chapters as is common in most books, unless I missed it. On ‘readers mode’ option of the PDF version which I downloaded, a number of sentences were jumbled up, difficult to follow unless one switches to ‘page’ or ‘continuous’ mode.
This book will mostly appeal to the learned or readers with some level of understanding of the English language and current knowledge of or history of the nuclear arms race. It will appeal least to the common reader with basic education with no knowledge of matters nuclear or an understanding of the history of Israel as a nation and the relationships between it, America and the Middle East countries.
******
Escape
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on Smashwords
Like WACHARO's review? Post a comment saying so!
Latest Review: "Escape" by Belle Ami
