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@ElaneKeller

I came across @ElaneKeller after she (I presume) left some very lovely comments about Cutthroats of the Coast. It was reading her own writer reviews that gave me the idea to post my own thoughts. Wattpad is a supportive community and what she started doing was an example to me on how I could proceed.

Covenant of Poppies is a book I am still reading but it is something that I think is startlingly different in our wonderful rainbow land of high school romances. Amongst the fevered teen dreams, Covenant squats there like a black cenotaph – an unpleasant reminder of the nastiness of the real world.

Set in the Balkans in the nineties, it follows a young American journalist who is sent to Belgrade to cover the impending crisis as Milosovic and his thugs begin to tear Yugoslavia apart. It's a genre of story I have a really soft spot for, having grown up watching movies like Salvador, All The President's Men and The Killing Fields. Covenant is a political thriller with its heart on its sleeve. It is still hard to accept the awfulness of what went on in the heart of Europe at that time. It is even harder to believe that powerful European countries like the UK, France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands could be so supine in the face of fascism. “What?” you might say. “Did World War Two never happen? Have we really learned that little?”

Enough of my sounding off. Back to the book. Covenent belts along, throwing our hero into a melting pot of ethnic rivalries an mutual suspicion. @ElaneKeller guides us through these labyrinthine relationships with aplomb. Anyone who followed the Balkans conflict knows that there was little in the way of black and white to hang your moral outrage on, there was only grey realpolitik. In the middle of it all were ordinary people.

This is where Covenent of Poppies comes into its own. @ElaneKeller describes the effect of the looming conflict on the lives of ordinary people (seen through the lens of the American). Familial ties are strained. Communities are split. Traditional beliefs, religion and peasant superstition have as much as weight in the decision making process as rationality and common sense. There are standout instances of this in the story which reveal these tensions.

Early in the book, shortly after our hero arrives in Belgrade, we are introduced to the improbably named Bog, a Belgrade DJ, who belts out a stream of anti-American invective that feels like a transcript of a real broadcast. Also, when the American, Duke, stays with his Croatian relatives, a gathering disintegrates into bitter recrimination. It becomes all too clear that there is little individuals can do to slow down the social catastrophe when everyone is immersed into this swamp of poisonous influences. It is a sobering reflection and it seems very real. It makes you stop and think. Are there similar tensions in your own home country? What does it take to really kick over the ants nest? The story is littered with such instances, building a sense that Pandora's Box has been opened and there is no chance in hell, now all the nasties are out, that you are ever going to get them back in again. Watch for the loons in your own backyard is the lesson of this story.

Covenant of Poppies is the sort of thing that there should be more of on Wattpad. Intelligent, well written, gripping and challenging, it should be on everyone's reading list.

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