A Far Country

From Barnes & Noble

The second novel by Daniel Mason (The Piano Tuner) takes us to an unnamed South American country. In a small rural village, 14-year-old Isabel and her family are striving frantically to stave off starvation. Finally, in an act of desperation, they send Isabel to live with their city cousins, where they assume that she will be reunited with her brother Isaias. But when she arrives in the almost equally impoverished city, Isabel learns that her beloved older brother has disappeared. Obsessed with finding him, this deeply intuitive, perhaps even psychic young girl begins her search in a new, inhospitable home.

Matt Steinglass

Ultimately, the debt A Far Country owes to Black Orpheus only testifies to the enduring power of its narrative in third-world life. The fear that animates Isabel's quest is the terror not of poverty but of being lost: stripped away from one's village, one's family, from anything one might call home. Her search for her brother is a struggle to anchor herself against the modern world's chaos. In this case, however, it is Eurydice who is seeking her lost musician, not the other way around.
— The New York Times

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 cliches. 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 2006 Reed Business Information.

KLIATT - Lorie Johnson Paldino

Isabel, her brother Isaac and their parents live in a primitive village in the backlands of a fictional far country. Mainly sugarcane sharecroppers, they attempt not to eke out a living, but merely to survive each passing season. The villagers are hopelessly tied to the whims of the weather, as drought, disease and starvation invariably come. Isabel, growing up in this environment, is watchful and sensitive. In fact, she even has a gift for sensing, and she is particularly in tune with her brother Isaac. This gift falls short, however, when Isaac moves to the city in search of prosperity, and Isabel follows soon after. Isabel manages to reach her cousin's shack, but Isaac is not there. She searches through months of trials, growing with each experience, yet still restless to find Isaac. She is ever fearful that her loss of innocence will sever the connection she shares with her brother. Daniel Mason's second novel, following on the heels of the highly acclaimed Piano Tuner, recreates every inch of the backlands and the enormous city of A Far Country. His beautiful, lilting prose sings in the ears and soothes the senses. Mason captures so crisply the sense of sadness that pervades Isabel's character. We are as drawn to the land as the backlanders are, as full of hope as the northerners migrating south, as disillusioned as the city dwellers who realize the harshness of life regardless of the location. Mason's novel fits nicely into the genre of immigrant literature. Despite the fact that his country is fictional, Isabel and Isaac's experiences are nevertheless shared experiences, universal in nature. Reviewer: Lorie Johnson Paldino

Library Journal

After the lush and intricate plotting of his debut, The Piano Tuner, Mason returns with a story that stylistically stands in stark contrast—a welcome sign that this novelist doesn't care to repeat himself. There's trouble in St. Michael in the Cane, a small town in an unnamed Third World country overwhelmed by drought and the machinations of rich men who pretend the land is theirs. Young Isabel is so deeply attached to her older brother, Isaias, that she can locate him anywhere in a huge stand of sugarcane—evidently, she's got a sixth sense, something troublesome that her family tries to shut off. There's no other magic in their grim lives, except perhaps Isaias's gift for playing the fiddle, which takes him to the big city to earn some money. He returns with a bit of cash, then disappears again, and as the family's fortunes plummet, Isabel is sent to the city to find him. Although beautifully crafted, this is a painful read about people whose lives are as shriveled as plants starched by the relentless sun. Mason should be applauded for ducking easy sentiment, but some readers may find the stubborn despair unedifying. For larger collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/1/06.]
—Barbara Hoffert

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 BangsCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

What seems little more than inchoate allegory gradually mutates into intriguing parable in this teasingly unconventional second novel from the California author of The Piano Tuner (2002). Fourteen-year-old Isabel is on a search for her older brother Isaias, who left their drought-ridden village ("one day," we're informed, to be "name[d] Saint Michael in the Cane") to live in "the Settlements" outside a thriving city imperiled by an ongoing war. Generic topographical and ethnic detail suggest a South American or (more likely) Southeast Asian setting, but the real point is the universality of the siblings' experiences. Isaias, only a remembered presence throughout much of the narrative, is energetic and hopeful, a promising musician seeking a remunerative professional career. The more passive Isabel steels herself to follow him, moving to the settlement of New Eden, where she lives with her cousin Manuela and cares for the latter's baby. The novel's content is so unspecific and constrained that very little seems to happen in Isabel's new life. Still, Mason patiently builds a horrific picture of poverty, violent crime and ongoing exploitation; a nightmare from which Isabel finds only sporadic relief (in her part-time job as a political-campaign worker, and a near-romance with a gentle itinerant "portrait seller"), plunging repeatedly into consecutive disappointments (at a hospital mental ward where she's relieved not to find Isaias, and a frustrating visit to the Department of Disappeared Persons). Mason keeps the reader off guard and guessing, and it doesn't always work: There are stretches during which the novel feels tentative and forced. But there's a terrific payoff-a riveting climacticscene in which Isabel believes she sees Isaias in the street, and follows him to "the source," which will direct countless others onto the path the two of them have traveled. Imperfectly realized and disturbingly enigmatic, but quite fascinating.