In a Far-Off Land

Between the author and the synopsis of this book, I was super excited when I came across this book. The Old Hollywood feel jumps off the page early on in the book, granted, it highlights the darker side of show business.    Mina Sinclaire ran away to Hollywood with a dream of saving her family's farm. Instead, she finds herself deep in poverty and making money any way she thinks she can despite the shame it brings her. Her only saving grace is her friendship with her agent, Max, and the hope that he will make her star despite a recent strain that's been put on their relationship. Things get worse for her when she finds herself in the vicinity of a murdered industry man.    The lead-in is slow, and truthfully, I could only take Mina's voice in small doses. I found myself more invested in Oscar and Max's side of the story. The end of the book was worth the slower sections as the story has a beautiful theme of love and forgiveness. Particularly toward the end, there are some lovely quotes. 

Overall, I had conflicting feelings about this book. I picked it up on a whim as I had a chance to listen to the audiobook and had seen the cover around.

The first 75% of the book was honestly a 1-star. Finally the last 25% of the book got a deeper and more meaningful message, and that section would be a solid 4 stars, so I'm settling for 2 stars by averaging and rounding up. It felt like a secular novel and though the descriptions were clean, the themes were very decidedly adult. To toss in a faith message at the very end of the story left it feeling unbalanced and incomplete, to me. It had no time to mature and grow and much of her final journey was simply summarized.

I had a hard time getting into the book in the first place, as there are some massive backstory dumps in the early chapters. I struggled to adjust to the narrator's unusual speaking cadence.

I also didn't like that the view of the border patrol and police was presented as unequivocally corrupt, demanding bribes and attempting to frame someone for murder, and so on. Sure, there are some bad apples. But the vast majority of these groups were and are well-meaning regular people trying to protect others. The worst years of the Los Angeles police were in the 1970s and the worst years of the BP officers, the 1990s. There is zero historical evidence to suggest that both groups were simultaneously 100% corrupt in the 1930s. I found this portrayal, especially now during such an attack on police this past year, to be extremely tone-deaf and offensive.

There was an instance mentioned of Mexican deportations as well. It took me a while to research this, as I had never heard of it before, despite having heavily read period Westerns and encountered plenty of respected Hispanic characters. It appears the deportation phase wasn't well documented and estimates range in the large variation of 300,000-1.2 million over three years from the US total. Yes, many of these were in the LA area, but the estimates of citizens scooped up range from “a handful” to “perhaps a few hundred,” so I found it odd that the whole Hispanic population would be petrified and hiding in the first year of that, where the historical photos show them gathering en masse to wave at a few dozen departing friends on the deportation train, not hiding in the gutters terrified of discovery.

I would have liked it much better if the beginning leading up to her crisis was a lot smaller portion of the book. It was just atmosphere, atmosphere, etc of old Hollywood, with a few names thrown in as Easter eggs. Not a lot of digging into inner thoughts. When we finally got to the part where the parable comes into play, there is so little of the book left. We are left uncertain of the state of Max's soul, since it seems he simply went back to the Catholic church (was he going to leave or was she going to have to join the church with them in order to marry?) and we didn't get to see what was going on with his faith while we watched him wrestle with some other really deep things. I would be interested in a sequel where they actually got to show themselves acting on the new resolutions and staying on a better path than previously.

Content: direct profanity, sanitized swears, prostitution, infidelity, heavy drinking, smoking, sleeping with a married man to get a part, theft, etc