Indecently unconventional ... begins like a recognizable combination of bildungsroman and adventure tale, becomes much stranger and more original...discovering within itself a profound understanding of the demands of religious practice. It is not only Wray’s heroine but also his novel that comes of age, steadily deepening and astounding as it develops ... a command of detail, context, and pace reminiscent of a reality-brined adventurer like Graham Greene or Robert Stone. (Hardly a negligible achievement, by the way.) ... develops enough hospitality toward the religious submission it describes that it begins to take on the properties of its material: it becomes a kind of devout inhabiting ... a literary endeavor suggestively and boldly out of step with most contemporary literary impulses, and certainly with mainstream political ones.
Serious, sober and frequently mesmerizing ... spare yet supple prose ... contains some very adept writing about theology and religious feeling ... manages to nearly always hold a skeptical reader rapt...a significant literary performance. This novel’s contents are under enormous pressure ... There are no blood clots of showily displayed research to block this novel’s arteries.
... brilliantly executed ... Mr. Wray’s novel is on one hand an entirely familiar story of youthful rebellion and on the other an unimaginable depiction of a cold-blooded killer groomed by the world’s most notorious army. Such tensions make Godsend relentlessly gripping ... Subtly, Godsend also illuminates the momentous transformation in Islamic holy war from localized crusades to a conflict of global proportions.
... entirely convincing ... Beyond its solid grounding in Afghan and Islamic knowledge, this unlikely tale is rendered plausible by Wray’s consummate skills as a writer. The various Muslim characters – cynics and fanatics, manipulative adults and lost children – are each clearly distinct and treated seriously and empathetically ... The book’s precise descriptions of the external world... are as rich as its rendering of interiority is profound. Rawly unsentimental but illuminated throughout by a subtle compassion, Godsend is a novel of enormous emotional intelligence which makes for compelling and consistently unpredictable reading.
Reversals and the understanding that accompanies them are appropriate to a story that relies on well-intentioned deception and the fear of discovery, but Wray is also interested in the ways Sawyer is visible to everyone but herself ... Godsend’s set-up is risky for a white, male novelist; the sense that something bad is about to happen operates on both the level of plot and of the book’s politics. Theoretically, the question of whether a writer from any background can – legally, ethically – write a character from a different background is silly. But the trouble, as Wray has acknowledged in interviews, is that very few people do it well ... On first read Godsend is almost physically stressful, the escalation of any little mistake made by Sawyer is easy to envision. But on a second, the knowledge of what happens renders wasted the delicate suspense that buoys much of the novel ... The extent of Wray’s foreshadowing – which touches most aspects of the novel’s plot – makes the ending feel like a conspiracy. Perhaps it’s paranoid to say that this novel, which appears on the heels of a series of empowered, gender-swapped Hollywood reboots, reads like it was written to become a movie ...
A tale of shadows and whispers ensues, with gut-level dread ... Much of the tension lies in how the narrative, limited to Aden’s point of view, lets us access her thoughts without making them transparent; it’s thrilling ... At the same time, the novel’s scrupulous reserve leaves you feeling there’s a blank where the story should be ... But is Aden’s opacity a mark of her psychological complexity, or just a symptom of the unguessable void that attracted Wray to Lindh in the first place? It isn’t the only question this fascinating and frustrating novel leaves hanging.
Wray’s tone is so restrained and muted the effect of such events feels more like moral disappointments than emotional crises ... Wray is paying appropriate respect to the matters of gender and religion he’s taken on. But the narrative is also subsumed by its own gravitas.
Wray undermines his promising premise with a detached style ... the narrative tumbles to a rapid, unsettled conclusion. Wray provides only delayed, incomplete descriptions of the story’s traumatic events; his skimming past powerful emotions will keep readers from developing strong connections to his characters. Nevertheless, Wray communicates a disturbing image of disaffected youth and the lures of extremism.
