Be Safe I Love You: A Novel

Written by Cara Hoffman

Narrated by Christina Traister

This widely acclaimed novel about a female soldier who returns from Iraq haunted by a tragic mistake is “beautifully written…suspenseful and smart and tender in unexpected moments” (Miami Herald) and was named one of the 5 Best in Modern War Fiction by The Sunday Telegraph.

Before she enlisted, classically-trained singer Lauren Clay had been accepted to a prestigious music conservatory, but her family’s financial demands—worsened by her parents’ divorce and her father’s declining mental health—pushed her in another direction. Joining the army allowed Lauren to provide for her family—especially her younger brother Danny, whose quirky, heartfelt letters to her overseas are signed, be safe, I love you.

When she arrives home unexpectedly, it’s clear to her friends and family that something is profoundly wrong with Lauren. But her father is so happy to have her home that he ignores her odd behavior, as well as the repeated phone calls from an army psychologist. Things seem better when Lauren offers to take Danny on a trip to visit their mother upstate, but instead, she guides them into the glacial woods of Canada on a quest to visit the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, the site of an oil field that has become her strange obsession. What happens there will change Sergeant Lauren Clay’s family forever, as she must finally face what she saw, and did, in Iraq.

Be Safe I Love You is “a rare, illuminating glimpse into the distinctive experience and psyche of a female vet” (Boston Globe); “a riveting suspense story and a frank portrayal of war’s psychic damage” (Ms. Magazine); and “a painful exploration of the devastation wrought by combat even when the person returns from war without a scratch…this book is a reminder that art and love are all that can keep us from despair” (The New York Times Book Review).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480586406

Cara Hoffman

Cara Hoffman is the author of three critically acclaimed novels for adults: Running (a New York Times Editor's Choice), Be Safe I Love You (nominated for a Folio Prize), and So Much Pretty (a New Yorker Books Pick and New York Times Best Suspense Novel of 2011). She is also the author of the popular middle grade novel Bernard Pepperlin (a Junior Library Guild Selection). She has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Paris Review, Bookforum, and National Public Radio, among others, and has been a visiting writer at University of Oxford. She lives in Manhattan and teaches at the Stonecoast MFA program at University of Southern Maine.

Reviews for Be Safe I Love You

[jenniferlynn-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an interesting book because it was about a woman suffering from PTSD after returning from Iraq. Most of the books I read on this subject have usually been about men. I wanted Lauren's friends and family to see what was happening to her and get her help before someone got hurt. Lauren was always the one to take care of her family after her mom left and her dad fell apart. She was responsible and was a mom to her younger brother, she even enlisted so she would have money to care for them. When she returns from Iraq, she sees that her dad is finally functioning and her brother has grown and become addicted to his phone and computer. Even though the scenes in Canada were scary (not knowing if something horrible was going to happen), they were also hilarious. Lauren and her brother Danny have a wonderful relationship and have a great way of talking with each other. The book felt real and not far fetched.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We ask those in the military to leave their homes and families and go all over the world to ensure our safety. People choose to accept this request for any number of reasons but whatever the motivation is, it's not an easy thing we ask of them. And unacknowledged or unknown by the civilian population, it's also not an easy thing for these soldiers to come home again, to re-immerse themselves in everyday life, to leave the things that they saw, troubling or disturbing or horrifying, behind them. It is a combination of what happens out there in the field, what those serving internalize and bring home, and the ways in which regular society fails our returned military in terms of mental health and support that keeps so many of the people who put their own lives on the line for us everyday in the news in such negative ways. PTSD is very real and it is a terrible thing. The percentage of returned soldiers who commit suicide is staggering. If we are going to ask people to witness the terrible things that they see and to risk themselves every day, until we can solve war, we owe it to them to find a way to help them live productive lives after their tours of duty are finished. In Cara Hoffman's latest novel, Be Safe I Love You, readers follow Lauren Clay, a young woman just back from Iraq and suffering from PTSD as she looks with changed eyes on her family, friends, and the town in which they live.Lauren Clay comes home from a tour in Iraq to no fanfare. She wanted to surprise everyone she loves so she didn't tell them she was coming. She's especially eager to see her younger brother Danny, for whom she was the caretaker for so many years after their mother abandoned them and their father sank into a deep depression. A naturally gifted singer, Lauren gave up a chance at further training in order to enlist to ensure Danny a better, more secure life than the one she lived. When she comes back into town, she is somehow different in ways that no one can quite explain. Thinking that she just needs time to readjust, no one worries or wonders about the pent up anger she is clearly carrying. The town is full of military and former military so they understand that reentry will be a prolonged and personal experience for her as she comes to terms with all the changes that her five years gone have wrought. But ex-boyfriend Shane, best friend Holly, voice teacher Troy, her father, and her 13 year old brother all overlook, or maybe just don't want to acknowledge, the fact that Lauren isn't okay and she carries deeper, darker scars than they can even imagine. In fact, she is spiraling out of control, hallucinating and confusing reality with memories and stories, and she needs help.When Lauren comes back to the US, she's been fast tracked through her out processing because she doesn't show any signs of being at risk. She has plans for the future and a family waiting for her. But what she discovers at home bears little resemblance to what she left when she enlisted. Her brother is a typical teenager. He spends hours on his phone and his computer. The mother who abandoned them as children is interested in their lives and willing to be present for both Danny and Lauren if they want. Ex-boyfriend Shane went off to college and his world perspective no longer matches Lauren's. And the biggest change of all, her father is no longer depressed. When she discovers that it only took a couple of months on anti-depressants to regulate him and pull him out of bed after she left, she is angry and bitter that he didn't solve this problem before. But his re-emergence also serves to strip her of the caretaker role she fully expected to reassume when she came home. Having her expectations collapse, even for a good reason, leaves her floundering to define her new role. And it is in this life of uncertainty, one that she can't quite believe is safe, that Lauren starts to exhibit more and more signs of PTSD.Lauren as a character is frozen and remote from everyone, including the reader. She does show flashes of fire when her anger erupts occasionally, when she cannot keep it tamped down in the place where her memories from Iraq are stored. She works so hard to keep that fire contained, not letting it melt and consume the stark, white blankness inside of her, because she doesn't want to remember the terrible things she did or the tragedy she saw. Running off to the Jeanne d'Arc Basin in the middle of winter, on her way to meet up with Daryl, the fellow soldier and close friend with whom she made future plans, accurately reflects her inner mental state. She is a character who needs the reader's sympathy but whose inexplicable rage towards those she cares about tests that sympathy time and again. There are a couple of secondary plot lines that don't add much to the story and seem either out of place or just filler doing nothing to illuminate the main story line, including Lauren's best friend Holly's relationship with Patrick; Troy, Lauren's voice teacher's oft repeated locally accepted lack of intelligence; and ex-boyfriend Shane's discussion with his current girlfriend about Lauren. And there were pieces missing from the story. What Lauren experienced and saw in Iraq had such a horrific effect on her but the telling of that story is saved for the end of the novel where it is not really explored in depth at all. The epilogue is promising but too easy, leaving out all the hard work of getting to that place mentally and emotionally. But the book as a whole is an important one, shining a light on PTSD, and PTSD in a female soldier at that. It feels like a very real, very raw situation and doesn't allow the reader to turn away from the results of soldiering that don't show on the surface but that lurk deep in the psyche. Emotional wounds are no less vital to treat than the physical ones and Hoffman has made that incredibly clear in the heartbreaking and broken character of Lauren.

[eenerd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some really gorgeous prose at times and a heartrending tale of a female soldier returning from war. A few holes in the stories/characters knocked this down from a 4.

[musichick52 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Spectacular exposure for PTSD and the need for recognizing the warning signs in untreated war veterans or those who never received a diagnosis. Learn the warning signs so that what happened to Lauren does not happen to someone you love. We may never know what these men and women were asked to do in the name of serving their country. The decisions they had to make on the spur of the moment can haunt them and distort their reality for the rest of their lives. My father would never tell us anything about his experience in the US Navy in WWII, but my mother told me, that as a newlywed, she would wake in the night and my father was shredding the sheets in his dreams, still fighting the war. When he was dying, my Dad told me that as an eighteen year old, just graduated from high school, boy/man, on his first day in New Guinea, he saw his buddy strangled by a huge snake while operating a bulldozer. Dad could not reach him in time. He kept that inside of himself for forty years. I recommend you read this with compassion and an open mind. We need to do better by our troops. My thanks to the author and The Reading Room for a complimentary copy.

[lostinalibrary · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lauren’s mother had left the family when she was young and her father suffered from severe depression spending most of his days in bed. By the time she was ten, she had become parent to her younger brother Daniel. She had a brilliant singing voice and had won a scholarship to a prestigious music school but, without a responsible wage-earning parent to ensure Daniel’s future, she instead enlisted in the military, not for patriotic reasons, but for the signing bonus.Now Lauren has returned home to Watertown, NY just in time for Christmas after a tour of duty in iraq. She seems, on the surface, to have come home relatively unscathed but, as she interacts with family and friends, it becomes clear that she has changed. However, they refuse to see the changes in her, wanting and expecting her to reintegrate into civilian life as if she never left. To her, they seem weak and undisciplined, refusing to follow orders and unable to appreciate the hardships of war and the sacrifices that she and all the others like her have made. The only person who seems to understand her is her music teacher, a vet himself, who, after serving, lost a promising music career to alcoholism. But even he is unable to bring back the old Lauren.She tells her brother that they are going to visit their mother. Instead, she takes him to a deserted village in northern Canada near the Jeanne d’Arc Basin where she tries to teach him skills she has learned in the army. As she makes plans for them to visit one of the soldiers in her platoon who has told her about the opportunities on the oil rigs in the Basin, the horrors that she experienced in Iraq are finally revealed to the reader.In Be Safe I Love You, author Cara Hoffman shows the devastating effects combat has on soldiers, men but especially women in an empathetic, moving but unflinching way. At a time when soldiers are much in the news with the huge backlog at the American VA and the recent spate of suicides among vets here in Canada and with so much lip-service (and little else) paid by politicians in support of vets, Hoffman paints a somewhat disturbing but important portrait of what life is like for returning vets.

[susan.h.schofield · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I won this book from Goodreads. It is definitely not a light read. It was well-written, but confusing at times as you didn't know what was really going on with Lauren until the end. I would have liked more detail into the early part of Lauren's life - why her mother left and how she so quickly decided to enlist. I liked this much better than Cara Hoffman's previous book, So Much Pretty.

[shelleyraec · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Be Safe I Love You is a moving story of a young female soldier’s homecoming after service in Iraq. Lauren Clay enlisted in the army after her high school graduation in order to provide financial security for her younger brother and depressive father. After five years of service her commitment is finished and she has returned home to Watertown, NJ, fresh from a nine month tour in Afghanistan.With compassion and sensitivity, Hoffman exposes the struggle many returning soldiers face in reconnecting with the people and places they left behind. Family and friends are sure Lauren just needs some time to readjust to civilian life and the inevitable changes that have happened in her absence, but it soon becomes obvious to the reader that Lauren is suffering from the more severe symptoms of PTSD as she begins to experience black outs and hallucinations.Amongst the confusion and anger Lauren is experiencing she develops twin obsessions, to toughen up her thirteen year old brother, determined to ensure he experiences the world without the buffer of a computer screen, and to meet up with a soldier she served with and follow through on their plans to work together at the Hebron oilfields. The tension arises as Lauren struggles to keep her grip on reality, and under the guise of a visit to their mother, heads for Canada with an unsuspecting Danny in tow.Of the entire novel what really struck me was Lauren’s thoughts about her service in Iraq …”officially women weren’t in combat. They just support. It was the same f** job as every soldier she served with, but with the added downgrade in title and pay.” In Be Safe I Love You, Hoffman honours the female experience of war, something rarely explored in fiction despite more women having been killed in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq than in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.Be Safe I Love You is a thoughtful and thought provoking story, and though the conclusion is a little too neat and easy, I think it is a novel well worth your time.

[thelostentwife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've had Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman on my radar for a while but it was a twitter exchange between two bloggers that I trust that had me pulling it out finally to dive in. The story here is deceptively simple: a young woman from a small town escapes a life of poverty by enlisting and, by enlisting, is able to help her brother and her father financially. Little did I know, however, how quickly the story would move on from that into something much deeper and of more impact.Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on April 1, 2014.