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,
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.
