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A Novel
by Christina Shea
Sweeping from post-WWII rural Romania to the cosmopolitan Budapest of 1990, Christina Shea's Smuggled is the story of Eva Farkas, who loses her identity, quite literally, as a young child when she is smuggled in a flour sack across the Hungarian border to escape the Nazis.
Five-year-old Eva is trafficked from Hungary to Romania at the end of the war, arriving in the fictional border town of Crisu, given the name Anca Balaj by her aunt and uncle and instructed never to speak another word of Hungarian again. "Eva is dead," she is told. As the years pass, Anca proves an unquenchable spirit, with a lust for life even when political forces threaten to derail her at every turn. Time is layered in this quest for self, culminating in the end of the Iron Curtain and Anca's reclaiming of the name her mother gave her. When Eva returns to Hungary in 1990, a country changing as fast as the price of bread, she meets Martin, an American teacher, and Eva's lifelong search for family and identity comes full circle as her cross-cultural relationship with Martin deepens through their endeavor to rescue the boy downstairs from abuse.
An intimate look at the effects of history on an individual life, Smuggled is a raw and fearless account of transformation, and a viscerally reflective tale about the basic need for love without claims.
"Though Shea writes vividly and has clearly done her homework, the story serves history better than fiction. Eva's eventual return to Hungary is marked by overwrought imagery and labored plotting, the opposite of what is needed: a glimpse into this woman's soul." - Publishers Weekly
"I'm awed by Christina Shea's gift for telling a story that continues to matter. Through her central character, Eva, she evokes the hidden lives of countless Jewish children. She juxtaposes Eva's resilience with half a century of Hungarian history, balancing the impact of loss and courage, of bliss and sorrow." - Ursula Hegi, author of Stones From The River
This information about Smuggled was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christina Shea was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. She received her B.A. from Kenyon College and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, and she is the author of Moira's Crossing. She lives with her family in Boston.
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