Beyond the Mango Tree - Softcover

Zemser, Amy Bronwen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0064407861 ISBN 13: 9780064407861

Publisher: Greenwillow Books, 2000

Synopsis

I am here, in the rain, tied to the mango tree. The water leve rises, above my naked feet, past my ankles. I wait ...

It has been this way since Sarina's family moved to Liberia from Boston eight months ago. Her mother ties her to the mango tree in their front yard, terrified of losing her. It's never for long, and Sarina knows her mother doesn't mean to hurt her. But things just seem to get harder the longer her family stays in this country so far from home.

On good days, when Sarina's mother is feeling better, she sets her daughter free. On bad days, Sarina dangles her feet in the puddles and mud until dusk, waiting for someone to rescue her, wishing for the one thing her mother fears most: a friend.

Then one day Sarina meets Boima, a Liberian boy, and he becomes Sarina's cherished secret. He takes her to places outside her dirty yard, and shows her the ocean, the trees, and the people of Liberia. Together they discover what friendship really means ... and that there is a world of joy, hunger, and hope waiting just beyond the mango tree.

2000-2001 Georgia's Picture Storybook Award & Georgia's Children's Book Award Masterlist

About this title

About the Author:

Amy Bronwen Zemser is the author of Beyond the Mango Tree, an ALA Booklist Top of the List Editors' Choice and Publishers Weekly Best Book, which the New York Times called "astonishing." She lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, with her partner and their son Raymond.

From Publishers Weekly:

Based on the author's memories of her years spent in Liberia as a child in the 1980s, this stunning first novel reveals the schism between two classes and cultures while evoking the loneliness of a white American girl living abroad. Zemser sets a dramatic opening scene through Sarina's first-person narration: Sarina's mother, who suffers from diabetes and grows weaker and more erratic every day, has tied her to a mango tree in the corner of her family's gated grounds to keep her from straying. Boima, whose "bones protrude in places where on my own body I must press down on flesh to feel them," frees Sarina both literally and figuratively. He tells her to meet him at the market where he sells his hand-woven baskets, "I can show you all kind a something-o." She finds a way to rejoin him, and he introduces her to the world "beyond the mango tree" through ancient legends and walking journeys. When Boima invites Sarina into his home, she witnesses a level of poverty she has never seen before. Through a series of small awakenings, Sarina begins to see that no mere gate separates her world from Boima's, but rather a gulf. Zemser demonstrates exquisite crafting with a scene near the conclusion that tragically echoes the book's opening scene. The author carefully constructs the contrasts that allow readers to detect the inequalities of the society as well as the universality of friendship's rewards, through the voices of her characters, their home environments and visual images (as Boima reaches into a muddy pool to cut the twine binding Sarina's feet, she observes, "Rain drips from his eyelids as he stirs the water, creating a wave of circular patterns. His dark hands, unlike my own pale feet, do not seem to twitch in fear of the unseen bottom [of the pool]"). Zemser's poetic, wrenching narrative transports readers to a foreign land, but the truths they uncover will surely hit home. Ages 10-up.--"). Zemser's poetic, wrenching narrative transports readers to a foreign land, but the truths they uncover will surely hit home. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Greenwillow Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0064407861
• ISBN 13: 9780064407861
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176