In the tradition of Huck Finn, these are truths the narrator cannot see in herself. Mockingbird is a beautiful book, and for me, an absorbing, exotic escape from our crazy-busy season here in the Pacific Northwest. I highly recommend it.

Julie Trimingham’s impressive debut novel unfolds like a fever dream. Written with sensual and intoxicating prose, Mockingbird is an original love story that may linger with you long after you close this slender book.

Scintillating.

This is a book of gorgeous language, so rich and self-assured I found myself re-reading sentences just for their music. How can anyone’s first novel have this much confident, fully-formed talent on display? The story itself is a tale of a woman–a young, white, North American actress–who finds a seemingly abandoned child in Cuba. In her well-meaning efforts to care for the child and her visions of giving it “a better life,” we see her moral ambiguity, and possibly a kind of cultural arrogance. As she bonds with the child, she leaves a trail of wreckage in her wake. But what’s more interesting, at least to me, is what we come to understand about the narrator through her first-person subjectivity. In the tradition of Huck Finn, these are truths the narrator cannot see in herself. Mockingbird is a beautiful book…

Julie Trimingham’s Mockingbird is a terrific read that will leave you questioning right and wrong, and the bond between mother and child. Trimingham’s observations―of Havana’s corroded beauty, of a lover who can’t love, of a baby’s easy joy―are not just exact but piercing. Literary yet fast-paced, electric yet refined, this is a hurricane of a book, by an author to keep on watching.

A novel of quiet passion and rare beauty, Mockingbird is a testament to the power of pure, uncluttered language―a confluence of feelings and physicality that will draw you back, line after graceful, memorable, line.

“Julie Trimingham’s Mockingbird is a novel teeming with yearning, with the indescribable smells and tastes of Cuban ardor. This tale of passion and its smudged fate, its undeniable allure, intensifies with each improvised move, so that readers have to gasp for breath, yet cannot help but follow this impossible seduction, and the center of gravity that shapes the beauty known as longing.”

When a wandering tourist in  Cuba comes upon a baby abandoned in a car in the blistering sun, her life of ennui is upended. Beautifully written, Trimingham’s poetic soul shines in this impressionistic novel that reveals those metaphoric meanings that reside at the edges of our lives. I loved this book.

I’ve never been to Cuba, but I could see it, hear it, smell it, taste it and feel it in this lyrical novel.  It’s a book that is quite literally and literarily sensual . But as much as this is a story o fplace, it’s also a story of longing and identity, of relationship and of the conflict of one’s own desires and values. Like the very best of novelists, Trimingham takes us outside of ourselves to explore life’s most persistent questions.

Julie Trimingham lives on an island in the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest. She is a the director of several acclaimed films. Mockingbird is her first novel.