When She Came Home
Like Barbara Delinsky, Campbell entertains as well as informs as she wraps a novel around a timely social issue. While many authors have tackled post-traumatic stress disorder in recent years, Campbell puts her own spin on it by telling a PTSD story from the point of view of a female Iraq War veteran. Though Frankie Byrne fiercely loves her husband, her daughter, and the Marine Corps, she has trouble concentrating on either her family or her duties after she returns from a spiritually implosive stint in an active combat zone. In danger of alienating everyone and everything that she loves as her psychological dissonance and her physical symptoms continue to escalate, she turns to therapy, in which she not only relives a shattering experience from her tour in Iraq but also deals with some repressed childhood traumas wrought by her demanding but emotionally distant Marine Corps general father. Plenty of contemporary food for thought. --Margaret Flanagan