A Year of Favor: A Novel - Hardcover

MacDonnell, Julia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688125468 ISBN 13: 9780688125462

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1994

Synopsis

New York reporter Elizabeth Guerrera gets her big break in Central America, but her personal involvement with General Valdez, head of the new junta, destroys her innocence when he does not live up to his promises

About this title

About the Author:

Publishers Weekly called A Year of Favor, Julia MacDonnell’s first novel, a ‘compelling debut.’ Kirkus Reviews said it was ‘powerful first fiction...a convincing evocation of life in a Central American country—and a compelling portrait of a gutsy, post-feminist heroine.’ MacDonnell’s second novel, Mimi Malloy by Herself, will be published by Picador in April 2014. Her stories have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Larcom Review, Paper Street, Happy, Many Mountains Moving and many other publications. Her story collection, Plight of the Piping Plover, currently under submission, was named a finalist in the 2012 Spokane Prize for Fiction. MacDonnell is the recipient of two fellowships from the N.J. State Council on the Arts, two Geraldine R. Dodge fellowships, a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and other prizes for her journalism and fiction. She is the nonfiction editor of Philadelphia Stories, and a tenured professor at Rowan University.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Powerful first fiction about an ambitious American journalist, working as a foreign correspondent in a Central American country in the 1980's, who's torn between her passion for truth and her equally intense, if darker, attraction to the head of the new junta. Elizabeth Guerrera, graduate of Columbia Journalism School, recipient of numerous minority grants, reporter for the august Herald-Sun, has been working her home beat of the South Bronx for six years when she gets her big break and is assigned to Bellavista, a Massachusetts-sized, coffee-producing country in Central America. But as Guerrera telexes her stories to New York and dreams of a front page byline, she must also grapple with some disturbing realities in this frangipani-scented paradise. There's the massacre of Aguas Oscuras and the dismissal of Alan Hartwell, her Herald-Sun predecessor, whose coverage of the incident had angered the State Department. There's the crazy gringa Mary Healey, a former Connecticut-debutante-turned-liberation-theologist midwife, who accuses Guerrera of regurgitating the lies of the junta. Finally, there's General Victor Rivas Valdez, the charismatic, 44-year-old minister of defense who wines, dines, and seduces the spirited, Spanish-surnamed journalist. Guerrera, who hopes to use Valdez to uncover the truth of Aguas Oscuras, discovers a formidable erotic adversary in the cultivated, soft- spoken general. Even as she learns that Valdez himself has ordered the massacre of Aguas Oscuras, Guerrera can't stop herself from engaging in a final, sadomasochistic coupling with him, a mistake that will cost her everything--her job, her reputation, very nearly her life. A convincing evocation of life in a Central American country- -and a compelling portrait of a gutsy, post-feminist heroine. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0688125468
• ISBN 13: 9780688125462
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330