THE SHADE UNDER THE MANGO TREE
Evy Journey
Sojourner Books
Contemporary Fiction
After two heartbreaking losses, Luna wants adventure. Something and somewhere very different from the affluent, sheltered home in California and Hawaii where she grew up. An adventure in which she can also make some difference. She ends up in place where she gets more than she bargained for.
Lucien, a worldly, well-traveled young architect, finds a stranger’s journal at a café. He has qualms and pangs of guilt about reading it. But they don’t stop him. His decision to go on reading changes his life.
Months later, they meet at a bookstore where Luna works and which Lucien frequents. Fascinated by his stories and his adventurous spirit, Luna volunteers for the Peace Corps. Assigned to Cambodia, she lives with a family whose parents are survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide forty years earlier. What she goes through in a rural rice-growing village defies anything she could have imagined. Will she leave this world unscathed?
Amazon → https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFMR9SG
Evy Journey, SPR (Self Publishing Review) Independent Woman Author awardee, is a writer, a wannabe artist, and a flâneuse who, wishes she lives in Paris where people have perfected the art of aimless roaming. Armed with a Ph.D., she used to research and help develop mental health programs.
She’s a writer because beautiful prose seduces her and existential angst continues to plague her despite such preoccupations having gone out of fashion. She takes occasional refuge by invoking the spirit of Jane Austen to spin tales of love, loss, and finding one’s way—stories into which she weaves mystery or intrigue.
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- What is on your nightstand?
My cell phone with audiobooks I’m listening to, currently The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner.
- What author would you totally fan?
Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize winner of All The Light We Cannot See, which I’ve read twice and likely to read again. His prose is enviably beautiful, the characters sufficiently complex, and the story is engaging.
- What makes you cringe?
Overuse of “broad (or wide) shoulders” and other such terms in some romance novels. I tallied “broad shoulders” in one I once read. It occurred thirty times. How often must we be reminded of such attributes in a romance hero? We know, even before we start, that he is well-built (and often handsome), with passion, power (or, perhaps, rage), and a magnetic personality to boot. Besides, he’s right there on the book cover, a big bundle of taut rippling muscles.
- Do you obsessively plot out each point or just go with the flow?
No. I don’t plot out. I work from general ideas and themes and allow my characters to dictate some scenes.
- Is there a word you love to use?
I love a lot of words. One that comes to mind because I’ve used it in two of my novels, including The Shade Under the Mango Tree is “halcyon.” I associate it with the tranquil, lazy days of early summer and early fall where I live.
