From Publishers Weekly
In this flat but intermittently intriguing follow-up to his bestselling debut,
The Piano Tuner, Mason takes readers to two impoverished locales in an unnamed, possibly South American (and heavily Catholic) country: a rural area known as the backlands, and the Settlements, the poor outskirts of a large city. When drought and deprivation become overwhelming in the backlands, 14-year-old Isabel is sent by her family to live with relatives in the Settlement. Her older brother, Isaias, moved to the city several months earlier, and Isabel expects a happy reunion; however, he has gone missing. As Isabel tends to her cousin's baby and adjusts to the chaotic city life, the search for Isaias becomes her obsession, demanding all of her resources—including what may be psychic powers. The story's settings fail to evoke a distinct world; the backlands seem taken from the 1930s American Dust Bowl, while the city—with its nonspecific political corruption, simmering class tensions, and the popularity of saints, soccer and soap operas among its residents—is a grab bag of regional clichés. Mason's strength is in description, and though his accounts of severe weather reach a visceral peak, Isabel is primarily an observer. Readers may be wooed by the prose, but the story is a snoozer.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School—A poetic meditation on poverty, development, and the unwavering strength of family ties among the rural poor in the Third World. Set in an unnamed Latin nation, this novel chronicles the search by a 14-year-old for her older brother, who has moved to the city for a better life. The two grew up near a sugarcane plantation, and Isabel cherishes the memory of Isaias taking her on long walks in the hills, where he would find wild cactus fruit and brush off the dirt before giving it to her, or jump into the plants to pick a pink flower. One day, after he reluctantly starts working in the fields, she is ordered to find him. Dwarfed by the tall sugarcane, she is soon lost, but seems to have an uncanny ability to "see through" and locate Isaias. After Isabel sees a spirit in the fields, her mother fears the girl is an "open" person, poised between two worlds, and takes her to a healer, who attempts to "close" her. With exquisite prose and a subtle nod to magical realism, Mason helps readers experience the starvation that causes Isabel and her parents to eat dirt, as well as the discarded tires and chaotic noise of the city. This is a quiet novel for teens who want to understand the poverty that can rend families apart and one girl's determination to see hers whole again. Isabel's journey is one that everyone will understand and no one will forget.—
Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
