Blog tour: River Sing Me Home

Welcome to the blog tour for River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer!

More about the book…

Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy.

These are the names of her children.

The five who survived, only to be sold to other plantations.

The faces Rachel cannot forget.

It's 1834, and the law says her people are now free.

But for Rachel freedom means finding her children, even if the truth is more than she can bear.

With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving.

From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana and on to Trinidad, to the dangerous river and the open sea.

Only once she knows their stories can she rest. Only then can she finally find home.

More about the author…

Eleanor Shearer is a mixed race writer from the UK. She splits her time between London and Ramsgate on the coast of Kent, so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea.

As the granddaughter of Caribbean immigrants who came to the UK as part of the Windrush Generation, Eleanor has always been drawn to Caribbean history. Her first novel, River Sing Me Home, is inspired by the true stories of the brave women who went looking for their stolen children after the abolition of slavery in 1834.

The novel draws on her time spent in the Caribbean, visiting family in St Lucia and Barbados. It was also informed by her Master's degree in Politics, where she focused on how slavery is remembered on the islands today. She travelled to the Caribbean and interviewed activists, historians and family members, and their reflections on what it really means to be free made her more determined than ever to bring the hidden stories of slavery to light.

My impressions…

Where do I begin? This amazing debut novel must have been incredibly hard to write based on how hard it was to read. And I don’t mean it in a negative way. This story is so emotionally raw that I feel I’ve been crying all my tears. And thinking about my tears makes me think about water and how beautifully this theme – this image of water as guide and as healer – flows through the narrative. There are so many things to love about this novel – from its powerful sense of place and time to its lush and evocative language. And the love… oh, the love…. because for every inhuman act encountered in this story there is so much love dripping from these pages. This novel is devastatingly beautiful.

Three words to describe it. Breath-taking. Moving. Powerful.

Do I like the cover? Yes, it is absolutely stunning!

Have I read any other books by the same author? This is the author’s debut novel. An author to keep track of if this is what she is capable of!