Formation : a woman's memoir of stepping out of line /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Named by Esquire as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year: Chanel Miller's Know My Name meets Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Anthony Swofford's Jarhead in this powerful literary memoir of a young soldier driven to prove herself in a man's world.
Raised by powerful women in a restrictive, sheltered Christian community in New England, Ryan Dostie never imagined herself on the front lines of a war halfway around the world. But then a conversation with an Army recruiter in her high-school cafeteria changes the course of her life. Hired as a linguist, she quickly has to find a space for herself in the testosterone-filled world of the Army barracks, and has been holding her own until the unthinkable happens: she is raped by a fellow soldier.
Struggling with PTSD and commanders who don't trust her story, Dostie finds herself fighting through the isolation of trauma amid the challenges of an unexpected war. What follows is a riveting story of one woman's extraordinary journey to prove her worth, physically and mentally, in a world where the odds are stacked against her.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Violation
• How It Happened (p. 10)
• What They Want (p. 23)
• Exodus (p. 33)
• Quarters (p. 39)
• Classical Conditioning (p. 48)
• Spoliation of Evidence (p. 52)
• Shock and Awe (p. 56)
• The Last Push Before the End (p. 66)
• Conception
• In the Beginning (p. 77)
• Event Horizon (p. 88)
• Suck It the Fuck Up, Buttercup (p. 95)
• Cry "Havoc" (p. 109)
• Redacted (p. 121)
• Welcome (p. 125)
• JRTC (p. 132)
• Consumption (p. 140)
• Invasion
• Entrenching (p. 153)
• Indiscriminate (p. 167)
• Filicide (p. 179)
• Respite (p. 190)
• The Way We're Trained (p. 193)
• Uninspired (p. 204)
• Ace of Hearts and Clubs (p. 213)
• What Isn't Mine (p. 217)
• Rage Against the Machine (p. 229)
• Monster in a Box (p. 234)
• The Way We Break (p. 245)
• Reconstruction (p. 252)
• Getting Out of Baghdad (p. 257)
• The Ghosts of Al Kut (p. 263)
• Two Miles Out (p. 274)
• Desecration
• Homecoming (p. 279)
• Your Ending, My Beginning (p. 286)
• Fight Me, Bitch (p. 289)
• The Warworn's Battle Cry (p. 294)
• Just Say the Word (p. 305)
• Interim (p. 308)
• Tub thumping (p. 314)
• Belletristic (p. 318)
• The Thing in My Vagina (p. 323)
• Interim II (p. 328)
• The Bat (p. 331)
• Dirty Little Whore (p. 335)
• The Breaking Point (p. 341)
• Interim III (p. 345)
• Closing (p. 348)
• Acknowledgments (p. 355)
• About the Author (p. 359)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In the sparse landscape of war memoirs by female soldiers, Dostie's resolute, literary account of her five years in the army sets a benchmark. Raised in a New England Christian community, Dostie enlisted in the army in 2000 right out of high school. Promises made by recruiters of an easy basic training were crushed when Dostie realized women "are shiny and new and very much disliked" in army combat training. She studied languages and was steered toward Persian, or Farsi, one of the "weird languages"-until 9/11 made her "linguistically relevant." Six months after posting to a predominantly male tactical unit at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in 2002, she was raped by another solder. Dostie reported the assault, trusting "father figures" in her chain of command to deliver justice, but her case was found to be unsubstantiated and she was ostracized by her peers. Deployment to Baghdad in 2003 provided the distraction of violence; armed with an M16, she discovered "Iraq is the perfect place for rage." After leaving active duty in 2005, she grappled with PTSD until marriage and motherhood anchored her enough to "live in the interims" of sanity and push forward. Dostie writes powerfully in this raw, explosive memoir. Agent: Eve Attermann, WME. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Afterward, Dostie had no choice but to see her rapist daily. She had come back to the barracks drunk one night when he forced himself on her. Although she reported what happened to the MP immediately following the rape, the question would come up time and again in the days and weeks that followed: Did she say no? The act of using the word rape itself took effort, as Dostie, an army linguist, recounts her harrowing experience of trying and failing to get the military to move against her attacker. Instead, the company largely closed ranks, leaving her with the choice to either stay put, where her rapist stood in formation with her at the beginning and end of each workday, or deploy to Iraq. From her first 11 years being raised in a Christian cult, through her deployment, and then her move to the academic world, bearing the trauma of PTSD and searching for an elusive sense of closure, Dostie exposes the terrible isolation of fighting a lonely battle for justice against an all-powerful institution.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Dostie's debut memoir describes the journey of a woman soldier struggling to survive and compete in a system that demanded she fall in line.Though she hoped to travel and attend college after high school, a meeting with a recruiting officer led to Dostie's enrollment in the Army, where she became a Persian-Farsi/Dari linguist in military intelligence. There are two main stories here: The first one traces the aftermath of rape. The author was raped by a fellow soldier, and she details what seems like deliberate incompetence in the handling of the case through official channels. In addition to the emotional fallout of rape, she also faced the cruelty of seeing her attacker and his friends nearly every day. Discussing how her account of the events and her credibility were undermined, Dostie exposes how pervasive bias functions in this guarded system. Despite many challenges, the author managed to do what she was trained to do: follow orders. When she found herself on the front lines in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, determination and growing rage fueled her survival. The second story follows the development of a bruised but not defeated soldier struggling with PTSD, coping with the challenges of adjusting to civilian life, and contemplating the political and philosophical issues involved in the war. Dostie successfully navigated life at home, and she ably demonstrates the contrast between developing agency and a strong sense of self after sexual assault and the demands of the Army power structure, which expected more obedience than independence. Each of these narratives deserves to be heard, and though they may have been stronger as two pieces, Dostie does a service by frankly confronting the hypermasculinized culture of the armed forces.An occasionally uneven but unquestionably inspiring story traversing the personal and public battlefields of sexual assault in the armed forces. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ryan Leigh Dostie is a novelist turned soldier turned novelist. As an Army Persian-Farsi/Dari Linguist in Military Intelligence, she was deployed to Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom I and II (2003-2004). She holds an MFA in fiction writing and a bachelor's degree in History from Southern Connecticut State University. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband, her wondrously wild daughter, and one very large Alaskan Malamute. Formation is her first book.