Sand Queen

By Helen Benedict

Nineteen-year-old Kate Brady joined the army to bring honor to her family and to the Middle East. Instead, she finds herself in a forgotten corner of the Iraq desert in 2003, guarding a makeshift American prison. There, Kate meets Naema Jassim, an Iraqi medical student whose father and little brother have been detained in the camp.

Kate and Naema promise to help each other, but the war soon strains their intentions. Like any soldier, Kate must face the daily threats of combat duty, but as a woman, she is in equal danger from the predatory men in her unit. Naema suffers bombs, starvation, and the loss of her home and family. As the two women struggle to survive and hold on to the people they love, each comes to have a drastic and unforeseeable effect on the other’s life.

Culled from real life experiences of female soldiers and Iraqis, Sand Queen offers a story of hope, courage and struggle from the rare perspective of women at war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781569479674

Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, has been writing about refugees and war for many years, both in her nonfiction, Map of Hope & Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, published in 2022, and her two most recent novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for her exposure of sexual predation in the military, Benedict is also the author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women at War Serving in Iraq. Her writings inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of those sexually assaulted in the military and the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War. Helen currently resides in New York, New York. For more information, visit www.helenbenedict.com.

Reviews for Sand Queen

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sand Queen is the first war (anti-war, actually) novel I've read where the protagonist is a female soldier. The author has also written a non-fiction version of the Iraq war from a woman's point of view (The Lonely Soldier). This is a devastating indictment of the American effort to maintain access to oil and of a country that was already torn apart by factionalism and misrule. Those who survive have lives permanently ruined - the civilians, the "boots on the ground" - everyone except the American president and his satanic posse. If I had one wish for this book, it is that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Brenner, et al be forced to listen to a female soldier and an Iraqi woman read alternating chapters to them while they were tied down to a waterboard. The miserable physical surroundings, the never ending heated blasts of grey sand, the constant suspicion and hatred of civilians who certainly don't see you as a liberator - fill the reader's head and are so vivid that it is almost hard to breathe as the chapters roll on. The ultimate tragedy for the US is that working class and poor people see the military as possibly their only path to success. As Bob Dylan said, "there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all." This is a painful must read.

[carolynschroeder · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a pretty startling, depressing book that follows two characters, Naema (an Iraqi medical student whose life is torn to shreds by the U.S. invasion) and Kate (a private/soldier in the Army sent to the outskirts of Bagdad near where Naema lives). Their lives intertwine as both manifest their reactions to the abduction of Naema's brother and sick father and the horrors of a very confused and pointless "war." The writing itself is a little uneven, I'm not sure if I bought all the horrific swearing, f bombs and such from Kate who, at her core, is a pretty nice person and one who seemed too smart and intuitive to act like her oppressor. I felt, at times, like this was an author from a very different (more privileged) background trying to "dummy it down" for this character. So it never worked for me. However, part of what is shocking here is the treatment of the female soldiers by the men in the units. So the reader is to make the assumption this basically kills the spirit, personality and all discernable kindness in Kate. That, I bought. There is little question the author has done her research. The details were just too real not to have some basis in reality. I thought Naema's story was so much more convincing, and beautifully done. Also, I sometimes felt these two women were just vehicles for the author to preach on the subject she so clearly knows well, abuse of women soldiers, PTSD, etc. So overall, I would probably only recommend this novel if you have some interest in that subject.

[timbazzett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

SAND QUEEN is an extremely well-written and skillfully crafted novel. But I'm still not entirely sure if I liked it. I'm pretty sure my problem with the book is that I'm a guy. And this is a story that is overwhelmingly female in its point of view. Both protagonists are women. Kate Brady is a nineteen year-old US soldier with blue-collar, Catholic, small-town roots assigned to prison guard duty in southern Iraq. Naema Jassim is a twenty-two year-old Baghdad med student, daughter of educated professionals, whose life of relative privilege is literally torn apart when her family is forced to flee to a rural area where her father and younger brother are randomly arrested and imprisoned by US troops. Their stories, which converge when Naema meets Kate who is a guard at the prison where Naema's father and brother are being held, are first-person narratives told in alternating chapters. I found Kate's side of the story to be utterly convincing and real both in voice and circumstances. She is the formerly good and obedient Catholic girl who has reluctantly but out of necessity adapted to the often brutal and misogynous circumstances of both army life and the war itself. Her language, laced with obscenities, accurately reflects this conversion, but is also part of the hard shell she has formed in an attempt to ward off the unwanted advances of the male soldiers with whom she is forced to work and live on a 24-7 basis. She gets no privacy, and worse, no respect from these fellow comrades-in-arms. She lives under a constant barrage of sexual innuendoes, indecent proposals and general disrespect which culminates in a brutal sexual assault by two of her squad members. Things only get worse from there.As a small-town working-class Catholic boy who entered the army out of high school, I could relate to Kate, but only to a certain point, first of all, of course, because I was a guy. I won't say 'man,' because that was still a work in progress. The fact is I saw very few women in the military in 1962, because there just weren't many. It was pretty much a "boys club." In reading Benedict's book, across that wide gender gap, it appears the military is still that, a boys club, much to the dismay of women trying to adapt to that club. Because in spite of all the so-called sensitivity training and decades of political correctness since my time in the army, it appears that the male soldier has not "evolved" very much at all in his perceptions of women since my time. And I am ashamed to say that I adapted very well to that boys club atmosphere. In any case, I was riveted by the personal narrative of Kate Brady. The Naema sections of the story, however, were not so easy to relate to. Partly because of the cultural barrier, I suppose, or maybe the class barrier even, because Naema did seem to come from a wealthier, more privileged life. And very little mention is made of how the rule of Saddam Hussein affected her own life and choices personally, although she does relate how her father had been imprisoned, beaten and broken by that iron regime. More particularly, however, I was put off by the multiple references to the US military as a band of "thugs." While I can see how they might look that way to the Iraqi people, I felt there should have been some tempering of this view by indicating more strongly how most of our professional military is now made up of the poor, uneducated and underprivileged from the less fortunate sectors of America. And add to this the fact that the objectives, missions and rules of engagement of this war were constantly shifting and changing, which engendered confusion and fear in our troops, not to mention the frustration and anger felt as friends and comrades were killed off by a vague and often invisible enemy, by means of IED's, mortar fire and various booby traps. The fact is, I was predisposed to like this book, because of a couple of other books I'd read in the past couple of years. One is an Iraq war memoir by Kayla Williams called LOVE MY RIFLE MORE THAN YOU. The other is a novel of the Vietnam war, with a former army nurse as a central character - FOR ROUENNA, by Sigrid Nunez. Both books graphically detail the physical, mental and emotional scars that women veterans will always carry. Such stories are dramatically different from men's accounts of war. Helen Benedict has obviously done her homework, and this book, SAND QUEEN, will stand as a welcome and valuable contribution to the chronicles of women at war.Hey, I guess I've decided I DID like this book.

[silenceiseverything · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm going to say that I know absolutely nothing about the treatment of females who are in the military, so I don't know if this portrayal is accurate. In fact, I'm hoping it isn't considering how terrible the female soldiers were treated in Sand Queen. It was just so heartbreaking and pissed me off incredibly. While Sand Queen did a great job in making me feel something, I ultimately felt that the overall story was just okay. The portrayal of the characters in Sand Queen was great. I did care for Kate and I felt genuinely sympathetic for Naema. However, I didn't feel that there was enough of a correlation between these two characters to justify the shifting narratives. In fact, I felt like the two stories the author was trying to tell were too condensed. There were two stories told and each story should have been a different book, in my opinion. While I was reading Sand Queen, I felt like it was good enough to get three stars...until I reached the ending. It just felt too abrupt. There were all the issues that were explored in the book, but I didn't feel like there was any real resolution. I'm pretty sure that this was the author's intention, to show that the issues with those that are plagued by war are never really resolved, but it still upset me when I turned to the last page. I read it and immediately had to check the blank pages following it, willing them to have something magically written. So, overall, I thought Sand Queen was just okay. I did love the way it was written with you knowing the ultimate outcome of the Kate character, but not knowing how exactly she got there. It's just that I was really bugged at the lack of resolution in the story. However, I was intrigued enough to check out the author's non-fiction work.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wanting to learn more about the war in Iraq, I picked up Sand Queen by Helen Benedict. The author based her story on interviews with woman combat soldiers and this paints a far deeper picture that what we were seeing every night on the newscast. I personally found this book grim, painful and eye-opening but at the same time, I also found it a fascinating and compelling story of life on the battlefield.Thrusting her reader into the mindset of a 20 year old woman serving in the American army in Iraq was jarring, disconcerting and distressing. In one of the last bastions of male dominance, the woman combat soldier seems to be fair game for persecution, bullying and abuse. In conditions that were extremely difficult, this added stress made their lives quite unbearable. From the Arab repugnance to seeing women dressed as soldiers to the debasement they received from their male counterparts, they were in hell.Bluntly painting a picture of this one small corner or the war, contrasting the stories of two women, one an American soldier who guards prisoners, the other an Iraqi non-combatant whose father and brother have been interred, Sand Queen, is honest in its portrayal of a war-torn country and the two races who have little to no understanding of each other. This is a well-crafted, in-your-face story that is both shocking and bleak. No excuses are made for the army’s attitude of unrelenting harassment, this is just simply the way it was for most female soldiers. Ultimately, Sand Queen is very effective at showing how demoralizing and dehumanizing war is and as such, is another brick in my anti-war wall.

[kjwernz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel, set in 2003, tells of an American prison in Iraq from the point of view of Kate, a young Army Specialist who guards the prison, and Naema, an Iraqi student whose family members have been arrested by American soldiers. Basing her novel on real life stories, Helen Benedict (The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq) describes the hardships and struggles in the day-to-day lives of each woman. Kate finds herself not only in a war against the prisoners, but the unforgiving desert climate, her aggressive male colleagues and superiors, and her conscience. Naema has suffered drastic changes in her life since the war began and finds that most days are worse than the day before, particularly after her father and brother and taken away. The author succeeds in showing the reader that the horrors of war leave everyone a victim, no matter what side they’re fighting on. Although this book is not for the reader in search of a happy ending, it is an eye-opening glimpse into a life that many Americans have never seen.