The Sound of Blue

From Publishers Weekly
Payne's second novel (after 2002's well-received The Virgin's Knot) ruminates on refuge and how solace may be found in music and memory. In 1992, after getting rejected from Harvard Law School, Sara Foster flees to teach English in Hungary. She envisions a glamorous Budapest "where poets and politicians gobbled cakes and cobbled history, mixing ink with icing, calling it sweet," but instead finds herself giving lessons in optimism to Croatian refugees in Csokhid who have fled the "twentieth-century psoriasis" of war. Though used to solitude, Sara feels painfully disconnected; she finds comfort in the music of Milan, a Serbian composer who welcomes her attention ("The sound of blue had permitted perfect strangers to turn toward each other in one measured moment of refuge"). But when Milan returns to his native Dubrovnik to face his demons, Sara follows, to the war-torn city where a young half-Croatian, half-Serbian refugee named Luka searches for his drum, which will "wake the dead." Payne employs flourishes of figurative language and poetic musings on the nature of refuge and memory. But these exquisite (and sometimes overwritten) miniatures come at the expense of the bigger picture; the plot's clarity and momentum suffer, as do character development and the novel's real and dark context. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Payne's haunting second novel, following The Virgin Knot (2002), takes place during the Balkan War in a Hungarian refugee camp housing 48,000 Croats. After failing to get into Harvard law school, Sara Foster intended to teach English abroad. Instead she ends up at the refugee camp, where she quickly becomes inextricably entangled in the anguished lives of her students. She knows her job is futile: the refugees are "only teetering on the edge of consciousness," never speaking of the past, for that would make it real. But Sara bonds with Elana, a widowed Croat nurse who has become separated from her nine-year-old son, who readers see scavenging for food and refusing to go to the orphanage. Running from her own demons, Sara is especially vulnerable to the heart-wrenching chaos surrounding her, echoing the words spoken on her arrival, "The minute you open your heart to a refugee, you suffer everything they have suffered." Against a background of stark wartime imagery, Payne laces her tale with poetic musings on the healing and redemptive power of love. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
The mesmerizing tale of an American woman’s quest for healing in a land of refugees, from the critically acclaimed author of The Virgin’s Knot Holly Payne’s debut novel illuminated the mystical journey of a famed rug weaver living in southwestern Turkey. Her latest storyline immerses us in an even more hypnotic set of circumstances, capturing another fascinating young woman’s crisis of faith in the Balkans. Sara Foster has left America for the the adventure of a lifetime—teaching English to the sons and daughters of statesmen in Hungary—but her idyllic adventure instead reveals a dark world of pain and redemption when she ends up teaching in a refugee camp. Sara discovers that one of her students is a celebrated composer and soon finds herself crossing the border to his war-torn homeland, determined to exonerate him for the death of his brother. In a journey that takes her to Dubrovnik, a magnificent stone city on the Croatian Riviera, Sara contemplates her own identity, struggling to understand why the region’s ancient and extraordinary beauty belies a history of grief. As Sara unveils the secret of the composer’s escape, The Sound of Blue reveals poignant truths about the quests for refuge we all pursue. Bringing to life a world that readers seldom have the opportunity to see through characters of great depth, Holly Payne has once again created a triumph of the heart and soul.

About the Author
Holly Payne’s debut novel, The Virgin’s Knot, earned comparisons to the tales of Scheherazade. A native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she has traveled extensively throughout Turkey and Croatia, where she wrote much of The Sound of Blue. She earned an MFA from the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC and teaches screenwriting at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.


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Payne, whose debut, The Virgin's Knot, was both a Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers and a Borders Original Voices pick, here attempts to give voice to refugees of the Balkan wars. When Sara Foster fails to get into Harvard Law School, she signs on for a stint as an English teacher in Hungary, expecting to teach upper-class children. Instead, she finds herself redirected to a refugee camp in the middle of a desolate winter. Unsure and alone, she considers returning home but is persuaded to stay by the refugees and their grim, quiet determination. Payne uses music, first by zealous drummer boy Luka and then composer Milan, to twine together all of their stories. Unfortunately, one-dimensional characters and distractingly truncated scenes mar the story, which has no real depth; readers won't likely be pulled in. Recommended only for libraries where Payne's first novel has a following.-Leann Restaino, Jameson Health Syst., New Castle, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.


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