Culture

Sand Queen by Helen Benedict

Sand Queen BY Helen Benedict. Soho Press. Hardcover, 312 pages. $25.
The cover of Sand Queen

The innocuous title hardly suggests the actual meaning of the phrase nor the brutality of the story that it introduces. This is The Things They Carried for women in Iraq. Set at Camp Bucca, the largest US prison in Iraq, in 2003, during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the novel makes this war come alive as Things made Vietnam a grisly reality.