In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Helen Benedict’s novel The Soldier’s House is a spellbinding look at how war effects both families and individuals.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The characters’ journeys are candid and vulnerable, rendering a pertinent, rich portrait of displaced lives reshaped by conflict and its enduring consequences.”
In her own words, here is Helen Benedict’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Soldier’s House:
As I watch Trump’s new war with Iran spreading throughout the region, ending thousands of lives, displacing thousands more people, and costing the American taxpayer more than one billion dollars a day, I cannot help but be reminded of the last time the U.S. went to war for no reason with disastrous consequences: Iraq 2003.
My new novel, The Soldier’s House, takes place during that war, in 2010, seven years after our initial invasion. The soldier of the title is Sgt. Jimmy Donnell, who survived several deployments to Iraq, during which he grew as close to his Iraqi interpreter, Khalil Pachachi, as a brother. When Khalil is killed for working with Americans, Jimmy feels so devastated and responsible that he and his wife, Kate Brady, also a Iraq War veteran, sponsor Khalil’s wife, Naema Jassim, their little son Tariq, and Khalil’s mother, Hibah, to come to their small town in upstate New York and live with them.
While Jimmy and Kate fix up the old pool room at the back of their house for Naema and her family, they pull up the old shag carpet, clean mouse droppings out the chest of drawers, and take down their posters of their favorite band, Modest Mouse. As they work, I imagine them singing along to the band’s mega 2004 hit, Float On.
What Jimmy does not foresee is that later that very night, Kate will inexplicably disappear.
Naema’s view of the situation is entirely different. To her, Jimmy is no better than her enemy, responsible for her husband’s death and the loss of Tariq’s leg in the same bomb that killed Khalil, just as she sees Jimmy’s army as was responsible for destroying her country. She knows that she and her family would have been hunted down and killed had they stayed in Iraq, so she must recognize that Jimmy saved their lives. But how she is to tolerate being rescued by her enemy, let alone sharing his house, is a central dilemma of the novel.
Music runs throughout The Soldier’s House as this plot unfolds, played on a little cassette recorder, the car radio, on an iPod (remember those?), or simply in the heads of the characters, especially that of little Tariq, who is only five years old when the novel opens and becomes quickly besotted with American pop music.
“The music filtering through the iPod and earphones Jimmy lent Tariq is a mix of the Coldplay and U2 Jimmy wants Tariq to like, the high-pitched women singers Tariq favors, and Hibah’s oud music. Naema wanted Tariq to listen to children’s songs in English, but he met this suggestion with scorn. He doesn’t care for all of Jimmy’s music, either, the aggressive guitars and growling male singers stirring his old, frightening dreams. Nor does he like the yearning notes of the oud, which put an ache behind his eyes. But he does enjoy the perky voices of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, and a beat that makes him bounce in his seat.”
Meanwhile, Hibah, Tariq’s grandmother, has an especially difficult time adjusting to her new life in America, for, as Naema puts it, “as hard as exile has been on me and Tariq, it is harder for her, the old having so much more to forget and so much less to anticipate.” But Hibah does take comfort in her own Iraqi oud music, the oud being a string instrument like a cross between a lute and a guitar with a particularly haunting, soulful sound.
“Later that afternoon, with the sun dying the lawn a coppery gold, Hibah sets to cooking supper in our tiny kitchen, the oud music on her treasured cassette player singing to us of home and the wisdom of Allah.”
The oud also makes Naema think back to her life in Iraq, and her little brother Zaki’s love of his guitar and familiar Beatle songs.
“Zaki would bring his guitar and play for us while we hid, a mix of the old Iraqi tunes Baba insisted he learn and his favorite Western pop songs, one I remember about a blackbird, another about peace.”
I was thinking of John Lennon’s famous anthem, Imagine, here, and how I once heard that song sung by a group of refugees who were imprisoned in a camp in Greece. When the young Liberian singer sang the verse, “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too,” I was moved to tears, for everyone around me that day had suffered untold hardships exactly because of those countries and religions. As do millions of other refugees around the world today.
In stark contrast to Lennon’s song of peace is the heavy metal of AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, and the gangsta rap that fueled so much of the Iraq War. Soldiers have been pumping themselves up with aggressive music for millennia, starting with the drums of war, but in Iraq they not only played it as they drove around the desert, but also blasted it nonstop and at top volume as a way of torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Even Jimmy, who is a gentle soul at heart, needs his occasional fix of macho tunes.
“Back at the start of the war, Jimmy had been the barefoot, scruffy type on his furloughs home, the unshaven, beer-with-breakfast type. But the events of his last tour knocked all that out of him and now he’s pure army. Five hundred push-ups every morning. A twelve- klick speed run around Slingerlands. An hour lifting weights in the basement to ear-crunching heavy metal.”
But to return to a happier moment — little Tariq and his ipod in the car:
“Naema twists around from the front to watch him, his eager face tiny between the earphones, his head bobbing to the music as he hums along. For so many years she feared that the war and loss of his father and leg would drain the happiness from him forever. But look at him now.”
also at Largehearted Boy:
Helen Benedict’s playlist for her novel The Good Deed
Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan’s playlist for their book Map of Hope and Sorrow
Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist specializing in refugees, the effects of war on civilians and soldiers, social injustice, and on violence against women. Her most recent book, the novel, The Good Deed (2024) is a finalist for the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her related nonfiction book, Map of Hope: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece (2022), and her recent articles have focused on Middle Eastern and African refugees, while her earlier work covered Iraqi refugees in the U.S., American women soldiers, and sexual assault. In 2021, Benedict was awarded the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.
Benedict’s latest novel about Iraqi refugees in the U.S., The Soldier’s House, was published in April, 2026.
Benedict is credited with breaking the story about the epidemic of sexual assault of military women serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her articles on refugees have been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, Guernica, Arrowsmith Journal and elsewhere; while her work on war is reflected in her novel, “Wolf Season,” (2017, Bellevue), her previous novel “Sand Queen” (2011, Soho Press) and her non- fiction book, “The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq,” (2009 and 2010, Beacon Press), which won her the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism in 2013. Benedict was also named one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews. In 2015, she was a finalist for the U.K. Liberty Human Rights Arts Award for her play, “The Lonely Soldier Monologues.” Her work has also won the EMMA (Exceptional Merit in Media Award) from the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.
Benedict’s non-fiction book, “The Lonely Soldier,” led to a class-action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of women and men who were sexually assaulted in the military and also inspired the 2012 Oscar- nominated documentary about sexual assault in the military, “The Invisible War.” Her earlier book, “Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes” is widely taught in journalism and law schools and has helped to change the way several newspapers cover sexual assault, while her book, “Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault” is used by rape crisis centers around the country. She has testified twice to Congress as an expert on sexual assault in the military.