Friday Reads: The Far Cry by Emma Smith

My first read for the Persephone Readathon #2 is: The Far Cry by Emma Smith. It’s a coming-of-age novel about a teenaged-girl who is uprooted from her home in England by her father, who takes her to India to avoid his ex-wife gaining custody. Teresa and her father have a complex and awkward relationship, but this colorful and enchanting new country manages to capture her heart and bring her out of her shell.

 

 

Keep scrolling for this week’s Book Beginnings…

 

Book Beginnings is a bookish meme hosted by Rose City Reader that asks you to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you’re reading, along with your initial thoughts/impressions.

 

Book Beginnings:

The birds came and picked holes in the sleeping ears of Teresa Digby. Their sharp cries insisted on her waking, but she, confusing these sounds with the early sounds of summer morning, made no haste to be done with her drowsiness. As though it was summer the chintz fluttered and through the chintz the sunlight was mellowed into pools of golden water. Awake, she lay in bed, dreaming of sleep. And in she drifted on the slow tide of returning senses, between the shrill twittering of sparrows and starlings, to beach herself on the smooth hard sands of her thoughts; to be scraped on particular by one pebble, one thought, one word – breakfast.

Late! She was late! She was late for breakfast! She heard the birds then as a host of angry screamers, and springing out of bed scuffled for clothes, shuffled into shoes, and caught back her long hair with a red elastic band. Her fingers, she noticed, were trembling from hurry, and she frowned at them, even put them in her mouth and bit them to stop their shaking. Still they shook. She threw open the window and leant out to press them firmly against the slate sill – slate that was cold in spite of the sunlight, for it was not summer after all but the last week of September – saying to herself in that arrogant tone so easy to assume when the conversation is internal:

‘Well, I don’t care; I don’t care.’

Her flesh shook, her heart pounded for no reason, no good reason, she told herself, for no fear. And she flushed with impatience at the idiocy of trembling out of fear of nothing.

 

I can’t wait to get swept up in this story. Emma Smith’s prose is charming and evocative, and I have a feeling this is going to become a new favorite.

 

Does this grab your interest too? What are you reading this weekend?