• ARC's,  Book Reviews

    Tea by the Sea: blog tour & giveaway

    Author: Donna Hemans

    Publisher: Red Hen Press

    Publish date: June 9th, 2020

    Pages: 252

    Purchase Links:  Red Hen Press, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Amazon

    Synopsis:

    A seventeen-year-old taken from her mother at birth, an Episcopal priest with a daughter
    whose face he cannot bear to see, a mother weary of searching for her lost child: Tea by the
    Sea is their story—that of a family uniting and unraveling. To find the daughter taken
    from her, Plum Valentine must find the child’s father who walked out of a hospital with
    the day-old baby girl without explanation. Seventeen years later, weary of her unfruitful
    search, Plum sees an article in a community newspaper with a photo of the man for
    whom she has spent half her life searching. He has become an Episcopal priest. Her plan:
    confront him and walk away with the daughter he took from her. From Brooklyn to the
    island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces Plum’s circuitous route to finding her daughter and
    how Plum’s and the priest’s love came apart.

    ADVANCE PRAISE

    “The forbidden love story of Plum and Lenworth comes alive in this heart-rending novel,
    Tea by the Sea. Hemans has a stunning ability to give words to that elusive feeling of
    emptiness, and the longing for redemption is palpable. In Hemans’s deft hands, regrets
    are explored with precision and compassion so that the reader finds herself unable to turn
    against even characters who have committed the most wretched betrayals. Tea by the Sea is like the story told in a grandmother’s kitchen with the odors of fried dumplings and
    saltfish wafting into mouths that are set agape at the heady twists and turns delivered in an
    urgent and beautiful prose.”

    —Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of ’Til the Well Runs Dry

    Thoughts:

    This book is the perfect way to honor and celebrate Caribbean Heritage Month. Having been there myself several times, It captures the atmosphere of Jamaica perfectly. The writing is beautiful and the connection between mother and child, even when they are separated, is palpable. I will be thinking about this book for quite some time.

    About the author:

    Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novel River Woman, winner of the
    2003-4 Towson University Prize for Literature. Tea by the Sea, for which she won the
    Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature, is her second novel. Her short
    fiction has appeared in the Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, and the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad, among others. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Greenbelt, Maryland.

    The giveaway!

    Head over to my Instagram to enter. I love that part of of prize is a special tea blend created by the author just for this tour!

    Thank you to Over The River PR and Red Hen Press for the gifted copy in exchange for my promotion and honest review of this book.

     

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