This is my first blog tour of 2021. I agreed to join the tour for The Far Away Girl by Sharon Maas and received a digital ARC for review from the publisher. The description, cover, author's bio, photo and associated links below were also provided by the publisher. I personally checked all the links to make sure that they were valid.
Description:
She
dreamed of finding a new life…
Georgetown,
Guyana 1970. Seven-year-old
Rita is running wild in her ramshackle white wooden house by the sea,
under the indulgent eye of her absent-minded father. Surrounded by
her army of stray pets, free to play where she likes and climb the
oleander trees, she couldn’t feel more alive.
But
then her new stepmother Chandra arrives and the house empties of love
and laughter. Rita’s pets are removed, her freedom curtailed, and
before long, there’s a new baby sister on the way. There’s no
room for Rita anymore.
With
her father distracted by his new family, Rita spends more time alone
in her bedroom. Desperate to fill up the hollow inside her, she
begins to talk to the only photo she has of her mother Cassie, a
woman she cannot remember.
Rita
has never known what happened to Cassie, a poor farmer’s daughter
from the remote Guyanese rainforest. Determined to find the truth,
Rita travels to find her mother’s family in an unfamiliar land of
shimmering creeks and towering vines. She finds comfort in the loving
arms of her grandmother among the flowering shrubs and trees groaning
with fruit. But when she discovers the terrible bruising secret that
her father kept hidden from her, will she ever be able to feel
happiness again?
A
beautiful and inspiring story that will steal your heart and open
your eyes. Fans of The
Secret Life of Bees, The
Vanishing Half and The
Other Half of Augusta Hope will
be captivated by The
Far Away Girl.
Author Bio
Sharon Maas was born into a prominent political family in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1951. She was educated in England, Guyana, and, later, Germany. After leaving school, she worked as a trainee reporter with the Guyana Graphic in Georgetown and later wrote feature articles for the Sunday Chronicle as a staff journalist.
Her first novel, Of Marriageable Age, is set in Guyana and India and was published by Harper Collins in 1999. In 2014 she moved to Bookouture, and now has ten novels under her belt. Her books span continents, cultures, and eras. From the sugar plantations of colonial British Guiana in South America, to the French battlefields of World War Two, to the present-day brothels of Mumbai and the rice-fields and villages of South India, Sharon never runs out of stories for the armchair traveler.
https://www.sharonmass.com
https://twitter.com/sharon_maas
MY REVIEW
I really identified with Rita, the protagonist, in this intense coming of age novel mainly taking place in Guyana. Sharon Maas's portrayal of Rita's persistent search for the truth about the death of the mother she never knew made me feel the sense of loss at the center of her life.
The Far Away Girl isn't all high drama. I enjoyed finding out about Guyanese customs such as flying kites on Easter Sunday. I found this 2017 article on the subject in The Guyana Chronicle in which President David Granger stated that kite flying on Easter wasn't done in other parts of the Caribbean. Yet I found another article about other Caribbean nations where there is also a custom of Easter kite flying here.
There was another character in The Far Away Girl that I liked. He was Rita's cousin who was nicknamed Dutch. Dutch became a pilot and flew visitors on wildlife tours. Once, while flying over an unspoiled landscape, he told the passengers that it was going to be kept that way. I'm sure the Lenape would have said the same when they were the inhabitants of the island of Manhattan before settlers from Holland colonized it. I did appreciate that Rita and Dutch both loved the land.
Here's an image of Kaieteur Falls in Guyana which is mentioned in this novel.
Knowing that the author was born in Guyana made a great deal of difference in the way I viewed The Far Away Girl. I'd like to thank Sharon Maas for sharing her world with us.
Buy Links
Amazon:
http://bit.ly/37AT1r1
Apple:
http://apple.co/3ogBN8d
Kobo:
http://bit.ly/3lxsVt9
Google:
http://bit.ly/2JwgEYN
Thanks for this lovely review, Shomeret! Glad you enjoyed it. Hope you get to visit Guyana one day!
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