The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

This is probably one of the best books I have read this year. At first, I was a bit intimidated by it and was reluctant to delve in. But once I did, I was hooked. The novel tells the story of a female photographer during the Vietnam War.  She has lost a brother in the war and is drawn to the locale to make sense of what happened.
Helen must deal with the attitudes of male journalists who dominate and are dismissive of a woman covering the war. And then there are the soldiers and their superiors who refuse to have a woman with them as they prepare for their assignments. But still, Helen persists and handles the situations courageously, at least on the outside.
The book gets its title from Homer's Odyssey about a country of lotus eaters, a race that eats the lotus flower, and gives it to Homer's men to eat as well - but not to kill them but to make them wish to stay where they are and not return home with news or any desire to return home.  This theme runs throughout the book. Helen and some of her fellow photographers, especially Darrow, a Pulitzer prize winning photojournalist, are drawn to Vietnam and to war in general. Helen and Darrow's desire actually seduces them to danger.  When she returns home to California she is lost, and yearns to return to Vietnam, which she does, much to her family's consternation.  She needs to get that one last shot, be there when the war ends, capture the images.
There are so many themes running through this rich novel. One recurrent theme involves morality; do the reporters and photographers who cover this gruesome war promulgate the violence and immorality of the war in their depiction of it? Is this just war porn? Or do they do the public a service by exposing the gritty and horrible details?
The last 20 pages of the book were so intense; I had to read them very slowing, savoring every word. I didn't want the book to end, but I was dying to find out the outcome. I won't give anything away.