Meh at best. My full review here.

Mixed thoughts on this. I enjoyed a lot of it, but sometimes the actual plot felt somewhat secondary. New info introduced too late in the story (94% in, for example). Great prose, humour (infrequent), characterization. But plot and story were a bit half-baked. Still, I enjoyed reading it.

What a book! David Shafer is a fine writer, he has marvelous ideas. It's amazing that this is his first novel. I was wowed at the writing. One falls right into the plot from page one on and until the middle of the book I was entranced, enthralled, bewitched. The idea that a global computer company wants to possess all the information in the world including the private and personal desires and whims of the world's population, but which ordinary human beings would have to pay for to do things...bank, travel, purchase anything...is a little creepy. Think Google/Facebook to which we ourselves have let into our lives in a way that would cause us to scream "invasion of privacy" if it had been a governmental tool. This is the company that one protagonist is being interviewed for but feels queasy about working for them. But there is another company, one which wants to destroy the information gleaners using very similar ways of doing so. I liked the "heroine", Leila/Lola, I liked Leo, the kid who cries "conspiracy" but I couldn't picture them together. I actually liked Mark, who drinks too much, is drugged most of the time. The end is a non-ending. It does read like the beginning of a series. But the writing is excellent. I would keep an eye on this writer. I want to be bewitched again so am waiting for his next book.

What? Just... WHAT?

I'll give it an extra quarter star because it tends to be mostly in English and because my Kindle version cut off on page 426, just as the action is about to start.

I love the characters and the writing style. I'm not entirely sure what was going on or what the story was about, but it was really fun to read. Seems like a sequel might clarify things?

I could go and list the MANY delightful moments in this book (Shafer’s writing in general, the rehab facility, the daycare, the various watercraft, the USPS and specifically postal inspection service as the one uncorrupted agency in the US government, and so on) but it’s more fun to discover them yourself. While the novel takes a little time to get used to (it drops you right in the middle of things and doesn’t do you any favors), it’s a delightfully unhinged romp through modern-day conspiracies. I had a blast.

More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/04/20/whiskey-tango-foxtrot/

PLUS a So Many Damn Books episode: http://t.co/4HJyyN2igF

Leila is an American aid worker who sees something she should not have in Myanmar which puts her afoul of a secret, supra-governmental organization called The Committee. Her investigation into what she witnessed and why she is being followed eventually lead her to meet up with Leo, a lovable loser who has posted his own drug and alcohol fueled conspiracy theories on his blog and with Mark, a smarmy self-help author under pressure to write another empty-platitude filled best seller.

Thematically, this book reminded me of Dave Eggers' The Circle. It is a hipster conspiracy theory thriller about the potential misuse of information in the internet age. But I liked it much more than The Circle, which I found to be heavy-handed. It isn’t that Whiskey, Tango , Foxtrot is that much more subtle. But it is more convoluted and wacky. Interestingly also, the book doesn’t really take sides. It lets the reader ponder the wisdom (or the folly) of regarding the enemy of your enemy as your friend. All in all, it was an enjoyable read, in particular because the three main characters Leo, Laila and Mark, were really well drawn, so much so that I think I would have been just as happy (or maybe would have preferred) to read a novel about the lives any of them.

I had a few people recommend this book to me, raving about it, but I'm not so sure I'd pass on the same way.

I liked that start well enough, Leila seemed to be written well and have an interesting story -- a lady working for a nonprofit health organization struggling to get a foothold in Burma seemed ripe with possibilities. But when the reader is thrust into the fairly shallow and scattered straits of Leo's head on a bike ride into his job at a day care I ran aground.
The first paragraph of Leo's story, the first sentence, just slopped out, for me. "Turning his head to look at the Fremont Bridge sparkling in the sharp light of the November morning, Leo felt his chin rasp across the collars of his two woolen shirts and his canvas work coat." I just think I'm not a big fan of third person subjective, especially when it seems like we get only one (fairly boring) dimension of a character.
When I emerged into the Mark Deveraux chapter I felt like I could breath again and the narrative jolted to life a little for me, the prose seemed to flow a little better, but I did worry that a third of the book would be spent with a character I just didn't believe.

The conspiracy at the heart of the book coalesces, it doesn't race, and that's kind of enjoyable. But I just found myself getting frustrated by some clunky dialogue and lengthy descriptions and the fact that much of the story hinged on Leo just didn't work for me.

Took some time for me to get into it and then WHAM, it had my full attention. Incredibly weird in the best possible way.