Part of the grace of the book is to present us with a thoughtful and impassioned woman who sits outside every stereotype ... Artfully structured and delivered with propulsive intensity and heart, American Mother takes us deep into what must be every parent’s nightmare ... To read the scenes in which mother and killer sit across from one another, delivered in palpitating detail, and to see Foley wonder how she might be able to help the killer’s daughters, is to be reminded that it’s those who are sure they know everything who are most reliably in the wrong. And that some souls are strong enough to step beyond even our most poisonous divisions.
An innovative, unsettling and utterly compelling narrative ... There is no easy answer to the many public conundrums that animate this book, nor to Foley’s private quest to gain insights.
The picture Diane paints of the incompetence and fearful mishandling of the American hostages is horrifying ... The book is compact and well-told, although I wish McCann had been a little less writerly in the jarring opening and final chapters, written in the third person with flourishes I found distracting. The rest of it flows fine and true. Diane Foley’s faith and empathy — she worries about Kotey’s daughters, living in a camp in Syria — is nothing short of miraculous.
Has an inbuilt tension, even though we know the key developments ... The voice of Diane Foley is plausible, only rarely slipping into a style that sounds more distinctively like McCann’s ... Remarkable, stirring.
An appalling, fascinating tale ... The book is, at times, terribly difficult to read, but it needs to be. As a testament to Diane Foley’s personal struggle and determination it is always fascinating, as is the depiction of the awful emptiness she experienced on hearing of her son’s death. As a book, it is incredibly moving, and as a journalistic exercise it is gold standard.
His account of her face-off with Kotey doesn’t stint on high drama; in places it reads like an excitable would-be screenplay. But thereafter he’s more measured, switching back in time to voice Diane in the first person.
I found her faith bracing, for the very reason that it’s unusual, and it’s also the scaffolding on which she balances ideas that should matter to us all: of compassion, of forgiveness, of understanding ... Nothing but humbling: that we should all be so decent and so wise, so generous of heart.
Her heartbreak and fury are evident on every page as she describes her family’s battle to save the son they cannot reach while forced to reckon with a murder that can never be understood, let alone explained. It is hard to call such a tragic story a thing of beauty, and yet that is what McCann has created here. Unforgettable.
