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 a place steeped in an ancient culture and a deadly history. Raised by her
grandmother in a Honolulu suburb, she moves to her parents’ home in California
at thirteen and meets her brothers for the first time. Grandma persuades her to
write a journal whenever she’s lonely or overwhelmed as a substitute for
someone to whom she could reveal her intimate thoughts. 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? Inspired by the healing effects of writing, this is an epistolary tale of love—between an idealistic young woman and her grandmother and between the young woman and a young architect. It’s a tale of courage, resilience of the human spirit, and the bonds that bring diverse people together.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFMR9SG
7 Things You
Might Not Know About The Shade Under the Mango Tree
- A small, short journal I unearthed
from a box in my garage inspired me to use the epistolary device to tell
much of the story.
- I’ve made the mango salad in the
story using a Vietnamese recipe for green papaya salad, substituting green
(unripe) mango for the green papaya.
- I usually situate my stories in
places I’ve lived in or have visited. But I’ve never been to Cambodia,
where half of the action takes place. To learn about Cambodia, I
interviewed a young man who grew up in Cambodia and lived for a while in
the west. I also read books and online articles about its current society
and traditions, as well as the experiences of survivors of the Khmer
genocide. I also watched a few movies.
- Two movies currently on Netflix
depict the Cambodian genocide: Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My
Father and a French graphic animation, Funan. Maybe, the first
film ever made of it is The Killing Fields (1984), about five years
after this particular holocaust ended.
- Towards the middle of writing the
story, I switched the male protagonist’s profession from computer science
to architecture as a tribute to my husband’s frustrated wish to be an
architect. He became a clinical psychologist, instead.
- I interviewed an architect from
one of my Facebook groups to learn more about the profession. I also took
a brief online introductory course on architecture.
- The coffeeshop where the
protagonists meet is also featured in Books 4 and 6 in the series, Between
Two Worlds.
About
the Author: Evy
Journey writes. Stories and blog posts. Novels that tend to cross genres. She’s
also a wannabe artist, and a flâneuse. Evy studied psychology (M.A., University
of Hawaii; Ph.D. University of Illinois). So her fiction spins tales about
nuanced characters dealing with contemporary life issues and problems. She
believes in love and its many faces. Her one ungranted wish: To live in Paris
where art is everywhere, and people have honed aimless roaming to an art form.
She has visited and stayed a few months at a time.
Website or Blog: https://evyjourney.net
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ejourneywriter/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14845365.Evy_Journey
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