Click the links below to find out what the media has to say about The Water Here is Never Blue.
From the Indo Caribbean World: Her paragraph evoking Guyana’s tropical, water-logged landscape is also brilliantly picturesque: “Water of life, water of death. All that wet made the country leak and burst and green grew faster there than anywhere…It was magic.”
“In this sparkling memoir, Shelagh Plunkett carries the reader in her pocket as she comes of age in Guyana and Timor,” begins Life in Quebec.
Imagine you’re a blond-haired, blue-eyed thirteen-year-old from Vancouver moving with your parents and two siblings some 8,000 km away to Guyana. You step off the plane and you are immediately assaulted by perplexing smells, a blanket of heat and all-encompassing darkness. “Night there is not like anything I had felt before.” So begins Shelagh Plunkett’s four-year adventure that eventually ends on the other side of the world with a surreptitious departure from the island of Timor. Read the rest of this Rover arts review.
From the Montreal Review of Books: “The Water Here Is Never Blue is a beautifully written hybrid: by turns coming-of-age story, travelogue, and mystery. Plunkett sheds light on the customs and cultures of two post- colonial societies in crisis, at the same time tapping into the stormy waters of adolescent angst.”
The Toronto Star writes: “Even better are her outsider’s take on the complex class and race barriers that both bound and separated her from the local people, and her evocation of the often dreary routines of the expat women.”
Live on CBC Montreal’s All in a Weekend with the lovely Sonali Karnick.
“The Water Here Is Never Blue” is a superior coming-of-age memoir as well as an evocative period travelogue whose sensory immediacy belies how long ago its events took place. And if you care to read it as such, it’s a sly but telling commentary on privilege and the uneasy coexistence of First World and Third,” writers the Montreal Gazette.
Une adolescence entourée de mystère. http://www.made-au-quebec.ca/comMediaArticles/mediaArticleById/755
On CTV’s Canada AM, Shelagh Plunkett opens up about her life, explaining her that her book explores the mystery around her father, who may have been a spy.
Shelagh Plunkett 