“Carla. My mother left when I was five years old. I have a photo of the two of us, standing in our yard. In the picture, my mother is nineteen and bone-thin. The glass shards on the top of our fence glitter in the afternoon sun and our smiles are the same: lopsided, without fear…I am wearing a cotton dress, a dress I wore every day until it split along the back seam.”
That’s the opening to Amanda Eyre Ward’s novel The Same Sky. When the story begins Carla is ten and still living in Honduras with her grandmother and younger brother. They live in squalor, on the edge of a dump where they search for things to sell and scraps of food.
Alternating chapters tell the story of Alice and her husband Jake, who own a barbecue restaurant in Austin, Texas. After spending their life savings on adopting a child, the birth mother decides she can’t give him up. Alice and Jake struggle to decide whether to keep trying to adopt or to give up and let a new dog be enough. Two stories of two very different struggles and of how they intersect.
When Carla’s grandmother dies, she decides to find a way for her and her brother to make the perilous journey across Mexico to Texas.
This story gives a glimpse into what some immigrants willing to endure in order to seek a better life. As the book jacket says this novel “is about finding courage through struggle, hope amid heartache, and summoning the strength - no matter what dangers await - to find the place where you belong.”
If you’re interested in a story of courage and hope, then you must read The Same Sky by Amanda Eyre Ward.
