ABOUT THE BOOK
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 travels to a foreign 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?
An epistolary tale of courage, love and loss, and the bonds that bring diverse people together.
Book Details:
Title: The Shade Under the Mango Tree
Author: Evy Journey
Genre: contemporary fiction
Publisher: Sojourner Books (November 2, 2020)
Print length : 330 pages
On tour with: Pump Up Your Book
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT WITH EVY JOURNEY
A few of your favorite things: Paris, French films, a view of San Francisco Bay, Sushi, crisp skin on roast pork, tandoori lamb, black rice pudding, macarons, steamed crabs, great bread.
Things you need to throw out: old clothes I haven’t used in ten years.
Things you need in order to write: quiet place, my laptop computer, a big glass of iced orange-flavored sparkling water, and imagination and motivation.
Things that hamper your writing: fatigue, interesting conversations from the living area drifting into my writing space.
Things you love about writing: engaging with words, crafting a character, building a fictional life.
Things you hate about writing: agonizing over the most fitting descriptions.
Easiest thing about being a writer: writing.
Hardest thing about being a writer: promoting and marketing.
Things you love about where you live: I see SF Bay from my window; the gourmet ghetto is close by so good food is within easy reach; the multiculturality of the area; echoes of academia from a couple or so miles away.
Things that make you want to move: the chance to live in Paris.
Words that describe you: hard-working, loving, thoughtful, introspective, multicultural and multilingual, lover of art.
Words that describe you but you wish they didn’t: obsessive-compulsive, skeptical, ill at ease with strangers.
Favorite foods: sushi, crisp skin on roast pork, tandoori lamb, black rice pudding, macarons, steamed crabs, great bread.
Things that make you want to throw up: chili grasshoppers.
Favorite song: Krystian Zimmerman’s rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2.
Music that make your ears bleed: anything too loud.
Favorite smell: the scent of a Fragrant Cloud rose.
Something that makes you hold your nose: totten fish.
Something you’re really good at: procrastinating.
Something you’re really bad at: enduring grief.
Things you always put in your books: epigraphs (in almost all).
Things you never put in your books: dedication.
Favorite places you’ve been: Paris, Paris, and Florence.
Places you never want to go to again: nowhere—there was always something to like in places I’ve visited.
Favorite books: All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
Books you would ban: none, though I haven’t read everything. I choose what I read carefully.
Most daring thing you’ve ever done: jump into the Pacific Ocean from a small boat before I could learn to swim.
Something you chickened out from doing: ride on the back of a camel on the hot North African desert.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
Connect with Evy:
Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Book trailer
Buy the book:
Amazon
