Gina Rae Mitchell

The Shade Under the Mango Tree by Evy Journey | Book Spotlight

A book blog tour from iRead Book Tours.

Thank you to the author, publisher, & Lauren at iRead for providing me the information for this tour.

Book Details

The Shade Under the Mango Tree by Evy Journey
Published by Sojourner Books on 11/02/2020
Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Multi-Cultural, Women's Literature
Format: eBook, Paperback
Pages: 396

After two heartbreaking losses, Luna wants adventure. Something and somewhere very different from the affluent, sheltered home in California and Hawaii where she grew up. An adventure in which she can also make some difference. She travels to a foreign place where she gets more than she bargained for.

Lucien, a worldly, well-traveled young architect, finds a stranger’s journal at a café. He has qualms and pangs of guilt about reading it. But they don’t stop him. His decision to go on reading changes his life.

Months later, Luna and Lucien meet at a bookstore where Luna works and which Lucien frequents. Still hurting from her losses, Luna finds solace in Lucien’s company and his tales of world travel.

Inspired by Lucien, she goes to Cambodia. What she goes through in one of its rice-growing villages defies anything she could have imagined.

An epistolary tale of courage, love, and loss, and the bonds that bring diverse people together.

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Purchase Links for The Shade Under the Mango Tree

Amazon     Amazon UK     BookShop/IndieBound

Barnes & Noble     Kobo      iTunes 

The Book Depository     Chapters/Indigo

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Book Trailer for The Shade Under the Mango Tree

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Author Interview

Is this your first book?
This is my sixth novel. I also have a book of short stories and I’ve contributed to an anthology. If you count dissertation/thesis and research reports of book-length, then that number is higher. My nonfiction output, though, was addressed to audiences with very narrow specialized interests.

Did you have a title for your book before you started writing it, or did it come later?
This book went through at least three changes in the title. I don’t remember the first but the one before the current title was The More She Knows. I came up with the title The Shade Under the Mango Tree after deciding to end the story where it started— in Hawaii, under the shade of a mango tree.

Tell us about the cover design process. Did you have a basic idea of what your book cover
would be like?
No idea in the beginning. I looked through a lot of book covers in the genre that would best fit the book but found nothing that seemed right. There are very few contemporary fiction books with a multicultural slant. When I changed the title, I decided an image with mangos or a tree might work.

I’m using two covers for this book. One is premade that I bought at a cover design website. I’m using it for the print version. I had a graphic designer do the ebook cover. It was okay but it didn’t fully satisfy me. I have some art background (art classes, oil, acrylic, pastel painting, digital art) so I tweaked it a bit.

The first page may be one of the most important pages in the whole book. Why did you
choose to begin your book this way?
First of all, to give readers some kind of framework in which to understand and interpret the story. There’s something ominous in this scene. It suggests a lot not only about what might have happened but also about the foreign setting and the characters. All that will attract a certain kind of audience and I hope it amps up their sense of anticipation. You also get introduced to the main character who relates what’s going on through a first-person viewpoint.

I don’t often write in a linear way, with events happening chronologically. I’m aware this frustrates some readers, and I’m sorry about that. But I want to give readers a feeling for what the book can offer so they can decide from the beginning if it’s a book they want to dive into.

What do you want readers to take away from reading your works?
When it comes to expressive forms of communication like fiction or visual art, individual tastes dictate what you’ll enjoy or find memorable. So, if you like stories liberally sprinkled with angst, you’ll find something to chew on in my novels.

My novels dance around love stories but they don’t often follow the usual tropes of the romance genre. Love, for most of us, plays a big part in our lives, but loving occurs in the context of how we live, which often has quite a bit of messiness (both little and big). So in my books, as for many of us, I try to show that love, in its many forms, supplies some of the best opportunities for growth.

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Giveaway!

Enter to win a signed copy of Evy Journey’s THE SHADE UNDER THE MANGO TREE, plus a $25 Amazon Gift Card (3 winners) (USA only) (ends Sept 3)

THE SHADE UNDER THE MANGO TREE Book Tour Giveaway

Please visit more stops on the tour for extra chances to win!

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Purchase The Shade Under the Mango Tree online from a local book store.

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Easy Amazon Links

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For International buyers, the US link should open to your home country’s Amazon page. Please let me know if it doesn’t.

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