Book Stop Corner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Cuba is such a beautiful country, and everywhere you go, there's music and people dancing - especially in Havana.
----Julia Sawalha, an English actress

Julie Trimingham, a Canadian author, penned her debut novel, Mockingbird, that explores motherhood, ghosts from the past, inner turmoil and the Cuban culture.

Synopsis:
Cuba. Music. Love. Theft. An out-of-work actress travels to Havana in search of purpose. Her entanglements there are filled with mixed motivations, selfishness and altruism, love and peril, faith and disaster. Mockingbird charts the hurricane-fraught course of Mia's journey back home. As Mia says, "Legal and moral are hardly the same."


Being a debut author, Trimingham has given her full effort to make it an interesting novel for her readers and I applaud her for her talent and hard-work.

The story is about Mia, a failing Canadian actress, who takes a trip to Havana with her partner, Alex. But their relationship is drifting apart with passing day, even their trip to Cuba isn't working out, eventually falling apart. However, Mia goes on her own to explore the Cuban culture when suddenly she stumbles upon a lost and crying child inside an abandoned car thus breaking her heart into millions of pieces for this lost child. She even explores true love with Carlos, motherhood and a deep touching relationship with that lost child.

The plot that the author created is fantastic featuring many dimensions of a heart-broken woman in a foreign land. Mia carries a baggage of her past events, misfortunes and sadness inside her heart. Carlos, Alex's driver, is a local Cuban man, and the author portrayed him as someone who is determined and caring and he is just the opposite of Mia's boyfriend, Alex, a careless professor. That lost child is called Amelia and the way the author described her fate is really heart-breaking to read it. Amelia's birth-mother, Magdalena, is a teenager who is broke and poor and grasp anything on her way to survive even if it means to push her own flesh into prostitution. But somehow, the characters felt like they lost their depth and very hazy in description, in one word, felt very obscure.

Whereas the one thing that left me awestruck was the author's style of writing. Her writing is absolutely poetic and picturesque. Her articulate and eloquent prose made it easier for me to read the book. It is very rare that you get to see some exotic location just by meager words. Yes, Trimingham had done it. The author laid out her descriptions about Cuban culture very intricately, thus making us easily feel the Cuban music into our ears, the Cuban language, food and that picturesque landscape. Yes, in a nutshell, you will be transported right on to the streets of Havana and can see the Cuban music floating into the air. Thus the author painted the picture of Havana very vividly.

Verdict: Read this book just to feel and see Cuba with the author's evocative words.

Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Julie Trimingham, for giving me an opportunity to read and review her debut novel. 
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Author Info:
Julie Trimingham lives on an island in the Salish Sea, where the border between the US and Canada is blurred.
She is the director of several acclaimed films. Mockingbird, published by MP Publishing, is her first novel.
Visit her here


Book Purchase Links:

• Amazon US 
•  Amazon India

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