Set in an unnamed Latin American country, this novel recounts the search by a fourteen-year-old girl for her older brother, who has moved from the rural family home near a sugarcane plantation to the city hoping for a better life. A long drought, land grabbing by government officials, and incipient civil war force Isabel’s parents to send her to the city to live with her aunt and her brother. Isabel finds the city is far from the paradise she imagined; the poor live in crowded shantytowns with polluted air and water, and are constantly threatened with violence. Worst of all, her brother has gone missing. The poetic language and the characters’ bravery in the face of suffering give the story the power of a modern fable.

Mason seems to put a distance between the reader and what happens, partly through the way he uses little direct speech and it seems to be recalled direct speech, not set out with a new paragraph for each speaker but as a conversation carried within a lengthy paragraph.

We sense how vulnerable is 13/14 year old Isabel and we get a sense of how tough it is for the people in the Backlands and in the Settlements just outside the city. Danger seems to lurk everywhere as well as support and kindness. Isabel's ability to sense the future from seeing other people or their photographs and her ability early on to sense out where her brother is mark her as almost a mythological creature but because Mason does not make much of this and does not use it to allow her to find her brother in the city, it makes her more just a sensitive young girl, able to convey the distress in other people - a useful device in the end as well as making the reader feel more positively towards her.

I was unable to anticipate the ending, and although its positiveness seems, retrospectively, to be at odds with the uncertainty of the rest of the book, its happiness is underplayed and I was uncertain when reading about the reunion whether Isaias was in fact alive or a spirit since he didn't even talk to her.

It's a story about the huge gap between rich and poor - the wealthy either using their power to steal the land of the people in the villages in the Backlands or to use them as cheap labour in the city while at the same time looking down on them.

While Isabel seemed vulnerable and I kept expecting her to come to harm, she was also a curiously inflexible character, withholding her thoughts from those close to her. She would also act more impulsively at times and I guess these slight contradictions make her more believable and less of a clairvoyant.

You certainly get a sense of how much the family cares for each other from the cousin Manuela, despite being inflexible (and felt to be the outsider, still the cane cutter, by Isabel) taking in Isabel to the mother who cares a lot about Isabel and the father who, although he's not been faithful to his wife, keeps working for the famiy and wants the best for them. ( )

this book i find unreadable at first. or rather the subject matter does not interest me. it is about the poor life lived by a young girl in a latin american republic. the observations of everyday life are very good. the author has spent time in brazil obviously and has collected good observations of the locals, their worries and their religious obsessions. i gave up reading, but then i read a review of the book in this website and it mentioned the time when she (Isabel) found her brother, and i went back to read that passage and everything came together and made some sense. However, the story is not the main thing, the acute observations of peasant life is the strength of this book. However, peasant life is not very interesting to me. haha. a relentless life of hardships is not something I want to read about nor desire to experience. As a backpacker in brazil,i know the feeling of participating in their poor lives. one way of looking at it is the pleasure we derive of reading about their lives and put ourselves in it, as a kind of voyeuristic re-enactment similar to marie antoinette playing at being a country milkmaid in the safety of her palace in versaille. so this book can give us the experience without the hardships. Its a bit harsh my comparing it to a voyeuristic pleasure.i dont find it very pleasurable to read about the harsh life of others. it feels more like a chore to me. but if u do, than voyeurism takes many forms, and u will like this book. it is the same as reading a book about highflying city 'masters of the universe' types and living the rich, ruthless wheeling and dealing life by proxy. that is voyeuristic too. we are all voyeurs in life. I guess my voyeurism is elsewhere and that is why i dont find this book's subject matter interesting. ( )

I listened to the unabridged audio version of this adult novel and I was impressed, but I'm not sure if my students would be. This would be a great classroom novel to show what life is like in third world countries, but isn't something many students would pick up on their own.
Isabel was born in sugar cane country and grew up poor and hungry. She has a connection with her brother Isaias and is able to sense him in the cane and always find him. Then her brother runs away to the city to find work as a fiddler and Isabel follows. She watches her cousin's baby in the New Settlements (another word for slums) and has to learn the ways of the city. Finally, she finds him.
All in all, not much happens in the book, but the author is a truly gifted storyteller. It was a beautiful listen. ( )

Are you the type of person who can sit alone contentedly for a many hours merely observing and sensing the world around you? Are you the type of person who delights in reading words put together so creatively and carefully that they come to life on the page and in your mind? Are you the type of person who reads in order to better comprehend the human condition and, in particular, the currrent state of the world at this, the beginning of the 21st century—at this dangerous tipping point in earth's history where mankind finds itself entering a century of possible global climate and ecological disaster? If you are, then you might enjoy getting to know Isabella, the main character in Daniel Mason's second novel A Far Country.

Isabella is the teenage daughter of present-day peasant farmers in an unnamed, most-likely South American country. Her people are cane-cutters. The family lives in a dirt-floored hut and sleeps hip-to-hip in hammocks slung together in a single tiny room. There is a small town nearby, but they are a good four-days' journey, "by perch" (a crowded flat bed truck filled to overflowing with dusty migrant travelers) from the big city (a megametropolis of over 14 million).

Isabella is a contented, quiet, gifted child, extremely close to her older brother Isaias. She idealizes him; for Isabella, Isaias is perfect in every way.

As the result of a long cataclysmic drought, first the brother and then the sister must leave their village for the big city. Almost the entire novel is taken up with Isabella's quest to find her brother in the city. The book is full of vivid observation and sensing. The author has the gift of making it possible for you live inside Isabella's mind. As a result, the civilized world takes on otherworldly and alien dimensions.

The plot moves slowly to the climactic scene in which Isabella finally finds her brother. It is worth reading this book for no other reason than to experience this one scene—to live inside Isabella's head when she finally finds Isaias. This is an experience you will not forget; mark my words, it will haunt you. You will find yourself thinking about it long after you've finished the book.

Mason took a leave of absence from his medical studies at UCSF to write this second novel. He was urged to do so after the considerable success of his first novel, The Piano Tuner. He wrote the novel while living and traveling in Brazil. Much of the people and locations have the feel of Brazil.

There were times in this novel when I thought it was taking place in the near future. There are frequent descriptions of major climatic trouble: widespread drought; city-engulfing dust storms and floods; and ocean storms devouring coastlines. There are descriptions of epic migrations of rural poor fleeing drought to find any type of living in the big city. A man in the city tells Isabella that these migrations from drought-plagued lands are happening all over the world. If it was Mason's intent to place this book in the near future, I wish he had developed this idea more fully.

I enjoyed this novel, and hope that Mason will continue to make room within his medical career for more writing. If so, I will seek it out and read it. ( )