BOOK REVIEW
Tonga, Tessa & Kathmandu
Tim Cooney on Kristina Prater's novel Tessa Eyes On The
World
Tessa Eyes On The World, a debut
roman รก
clef novel, tells a tale about impermanence and change through the striking
tragedies and joys of an unconventional extended family. Tessa, the eldest of
four siblings from one mother and two fathers, is born with a conscious
awareness to help others and the planet. This emotional bearing leads her to
different parts of the world, including Mexico, Guatemala, Tonga, and Nepal.
While trekking in Nepal, she witnesses the trafficking of young women sold off
by Nepalese families. Profoundly affected, she vows to fight poverty and abuse,
and studies Buddhism to understand the suffering she encounters.
In 2006, Tessa was
killed by a shark (true event) while serving in the Peace Corps in Tonga.
The many people
Tessa had touched during her short life were shaken by the loss of this young
woman who excelled in academics, athleticism, and art, and who was on her way
to do great humanitarian work.
Through her
eponymous character, at life’s critical seam, Tessa reflects, “Then I was
looking up from below at the surface of the water as I was pulled down. I saw
the pale, distant, distorted disc of the sun, a froth of bubbles, my flailing
arms and hands…”
Author Kristena
Prater (aka Salodius Byrd), her mother, fashions the beginning backdrop of her
fictional casting of real events in Aspen, Colorado, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, during
the 1970s. During those freewheeling, counterculture times, she started Aspen
Mercantile, a vintage and contemporary clothing store. Her shop became a
popular hangout for beautiful local women in old-time lacey dresses, spirited
hippy men and itinerant turquoise dealers. Among other adventures, she sailed
to Tahiti and later became a successful New York model, before becoming the
mother of four children.
Prater effectively employs a
narrative of fleshing in the lead character of Tessa through her challenges as
a Peace Corps volunteer deployed in Tonga and through the eyes of her family’s
correspondence. Tessa questions her homesickness and the dynamics of those
close to her, far from her Santa Fe home. In the second part of the book—as if
tilting a hologram picture to reveal another picture—we then see Tessa’s life
through her mother Viva’s eyes, Prater’s veiled persona. Such an image brings
to mind a poetic Grateful Dead lyric: “In another time's forgotten space, your
eyes looked from your mother's face…”
Through shifting family dynamics, Tessa manages to
nudge her many relatives toward higher awareness and the importance of helping
others. Each evolves during their brief time with Tessa, especially after her
life is abruptly cut short in Tonga by a dramatic force of nature that inspires
her family to sift their lives to cope with the grief. After Tessa’s death,
Viva—who has already endured a car accident that left her son paraplegic—goes
on to process the accumulative grief for her whole family as only a mother can
feel, and, subsequently, the death of another child.
What is profound here in Prater’s
telling is the resilience of a mother who survives and transforms, even as her
heartbreaks compound. In finding tools to bear emotional loss, she writes:
“When I am afraid, I move in and out of my body. My family and I keep ourselves
busy, diverting our attention to the muscle memory imprinted in our bodies of
something missing: our daughter, our sister, our friend. We wanted to pretend
we were a regular family rather than people changed through continual shocks.
We built bridges across the caverns of loss.”
Yet, Viva gathers herself up and
decides to follow Tessa’s path and do what Tessa hoped to do. Retracing her
daughter’s emotional journey, Viva returns to Tonga and to Katmandu, Nepal. In
Tonga, she meets the Tongan royal family and discovers that her daughter’s
death has become a legend. She also meets the young man who tried to rescue
Tessa and finds that the two were developing a close bond. In Nepal, she visits
a home for abandoned children and the Saving Women Foundation, where Tessa had
earlier connected. Returning home to Santa Fe, Viva embarks on a life of giving
more and needing less.
This is a good book for a
book-reading group to discuss emotional learning, much of which is digested by
the author in her introductory poems before each chapter. Tessa Eyes On The
World can be purchased on Amazon.com in either Kindle, hardcover or
paperback.
Tessa Eyes On The World, a novel
by Kristina Prater
Bright Communications LLC, 2024
Pages : 304, ISBN-13 : 978-1958711781
Available on Amazon
Tim Cooney is a writer and
freelance journalist working for Aspen Journalism (aspenjournalism.org), a
nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom that reports on environment, water,
social issues, and history. He is a retired professional ski patrolman and has
spent his life in the Colorado mountains.
