The Sound of Blue

by Holly Lynn Payne

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.

Praise for The Virgin’s Knot:
“[To be] savored like the dark intensity of Turkish coffee.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Creates an almost mystical tableau.” --San Jose Mercury News

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, War, Hungary, Music, Womens, Love

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Holly Lynn Payne is an award-winning, internationally published novelist in eleven countries. Her debut novel, The Virgin’s Knot, was named a Discover Great New Writers Book from Barnes & Noble. Her third novel, Kingdom of Simplicity, based on a true story of forgiveness, won a First Place Benjamin Franklin Award and Grand Prize for Writers Digest. She is the host and producer of the Page One Podcast and interviews the world’s master storytellers on the stories and struggles behind the first sentence, first paragraph and first page of their books. Notable guests include bestselling authors Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), Dean Koontz, JT Ellison, Tess Gerritsen, Robert Dugoni, Alka Joshi and Yasmin Darznik among others.

She is the former CEO and founder of Booxby, a startup backed by a grant from the National Science Foundation that built a patented AI technology to aid book discovery for authors. She founded Skywriter Books, an award-winning small press, publishing consultancy and writing coaching service which she continues to serve. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her daughter and has volunteered as a producer for Litquake, the West Coast’s largest literary festival.

When she’s not writing, interviewing, or coaching other writers, she enjoys getting dirty on a mountain bike, surfing and hiking with her daughter and Labrador retriever, Lady Gaia. She holds a BA with honors from University of Richmond, where she received a distinguished Alumni Award, an MFA from USC, and MIM from the Academy of Intuition Medicine, bringing her healing gifts to her writing coaching clients. Payne has served on the faculty of the Academy of Art University, California College of the Arts and Stanford, and loves helping people reclaim their voice through storytelling. She has written for Huffington Post, Release Print Magazine, University of Richmond Alumni Magazine, MOCA+ magazine and Medium. She received her MFA from USC and can be found at www.hollylynnpayne.com and on Instagram and Twitter @hollylynnpayne.

Reviews

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

We went to Dubrovnik this past summer, and I read The Sound of Blue just before arriving. It is a powerful tale of people trying to live under conditions of war in 1992. There are some truly moving interactions between the characters, all of whom are seriously flawed but striving for something good. The little boy, drumming through the dark night leaves a haunting image.

In Dubrovnik, we spoke to people who had lived through the fighting, and their stories deepened my understanding of Payne's novel.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated the authenticity of this book. I just returned from Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro,and Slovenia. Our guides described the countries' sad history. The setting for this book is in a refugee camp in Hungary. The refugees are from Croatia. As I read the book, I could picture the scenes in Dubrovnik, Croatia. I heard the history repeated. The author describes the frightful times during the Homeland War (1990's) This novel describes how families are separated.....the prejudices among the different ethnic groups. The main character is a young woman from the US who comes to the country to teach English.... She carries personal baggage and struggles to find herself. I am not sure if I would have appreciated the book as much had I not been in the country and familiar with the hardships of the people. It felt very real to me. It gave faces and personal stories to the historical facts.

[David Woods · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book by google searching for books set in Dubrovnik. Read it while we were there. It did add a little to my experience there, and more importantly taught me more about the Serb/Croat conflict there in the early 90's.

The story/plot was okay. Her writing style bugged me though. Her sentence and paragraph structure was just odd, and I found myself re-reading sentences often, wondering why she worded them in such an awkward way that almost doesn't make sense. I grew pretty annoyed with her writing, and pushed through as fast as I could just to finish the book.

[Rosa Wichuraiana · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Sound of Blue centers around a real political conflict that was still a hot button issue in the media in 2005. Without that background, this novel would be your usual purple-prose schlock, but with it it's social commentary. The plot is so contrived and the characters are such diecut paper dolls - the beautiful redhaired coed "with a face that reminds you of others", the beautiful epileptic violinist, the beautiful teenage boy who drums out his feelings - that we can't possibly be supposed to believe they're real people living real lives. But that's fine, because they're allegories, and no one expects an allegory to be believable.

The Sound of Blue belongs to the romance-novel-as-political-allegory genre that includes such illustrious examples as Saddam Hussein's Zabiba and the King, and it must be read with the conventions of that genre in mind. (But I have to admit that even Zabiba and the King is a more enjoyable read.)

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

God, this sucked. Not only were the ideas and situations trite, but the author used the phase "was suppose to" multiple times. And not just in dialogue, where you could blame it on dialect or something!

[Sara C · Rating 2 out of 5]

This bookabout a girl named Sarah, she's just go out of highschool, and she wanted to enter to college, but she wasn't accepted. Her father was so proud of her cause she was going to college, but because of she did't get in, she get so dissapointed of herself and she din;t tell anybody about it. So one day she saw an announcement of teaching English in Hungary (there was a war in there) and she decided to go, to run out of her problems. But now she's afraid of all what she;s looking in the war and all the sick people, and the poor children. She hasn't meet yet the children she'll teach, but she isn't there to teach, she's there to give hope to those persons that had lost all that they loved.
The book is getting better, now is more interesting than the first peges, now is explaining better what is all about, and Sarah is meeting al the characters in the strory.

[Sally Atwell Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book, but I must say that it is very different from The Virgin's Knot. Different subject, different style of writing, I felt. It is about the refugees coming out of the Balkans into Hungarian refugee camps. It is the story of female college graduate who decided to go to Hungary to teach English, only to find that she was on a bus to a refugee camp on the border of what was Yugoslavia. This is a recent time period. There are three main characters: the teacher, Sara; the musician, Milan; and the child, Luka.

Holly Payne goes back and forth between these three people, and their lives past and present, and weaves an interesting story - The Sound of Blue. Some things are mentioned in one chapter and then are picked up later in the book, so a reader must be able to jump back and forth in time. I didn't find it hard to do that.

[Anne · Rating 1 out of 5]

So disappointed. The premise sounded so intriguing. I was excited about the setting of Dubrovnik and saw first-hand the loving efforts restoring the beauty that was destroyed during the Serbo-Croatian war. The book didn't deliver. Know first that the picture shown on Goodreads is the cover from the original hardcover edition. There is now available a very revised paperback edition from a different publisher. The author chose to pare down by about a hundred pages, rearrange the order of introduction of characters and events. The resulting book is choppy and confusing. Characters are not fleshed out so that their motivations and actions make sense. The ending is too pat. Within our discussion group, a few members also read the original edition to compare and reported that the first runs more chronologically.

[Yael Itamar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew nothing about the Yugosavian Wars of the 1990s before reading this book, and I appreciated the chance to learn a little bit about that conflict. However, I think a different writer could have handled this book a lot better. It was the prose that bothered me the most. While there were some pretty uses of language (“eyes shaped liked crescent moons”), I mostly found the language emotionally overbearing and chock-full of purple prose. It’s very difficult to relate to the refugees’ pain when the author constantly overemphasizes their suffering.

I would recommend this book to more patient readers who like books about emotional journeys and coming to terms with your past.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cried reading this book. It has so much that I love: a mysterious past, desperate people, vivid descriptions, mysterious characters eventually converging, and eventual hope of self-forgiveness.
I liked that it was set in the middle of the war, rather than being about the war. It left things messy, uncomfortable, and closer to honest. It admits that conflicts don't just end.
The main character is admirable, even as she struggles, is lost, and eventually starts to face herself, she keeps her sense of justice and her search for a mission.

[Elizabeth Gibbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book revolved around war, people being held in a camp, the view from inside and outside the camp, and the search for loved ones. The characters were interesting and the story was intricately woven around all of them. All in all, it was a good book but it was emotional and somewhat depressing.

[Benjamin Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the characters and the setting. I thought a lot of the details, particularly of life in the refugee camp were very interesting. I also thought parts of the story didn't fit together really great and were kind of a mess. I guess I would say I enjoyed it, but it could have been better.

[Trudy Huff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young American women travels to Hungary to teach Kosovo refugees English in a camp run by a ruthless man. The author weaves a heartbreaking story around a young boy who got separated from his mother and she falls in love with a young Serb. She describes the city of Dubrovnik under siege.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty okay book with a really interesting plot. Reader beware though about 2/3 of the way through the "f" word is used and really it feels like the author just wanted to use it and it didn't really belong. (In my opinion it never belongs.) It also has a pretty unsatisfactory ending.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really good book. It had some language in it, but very moving. Gives you an idea of what it would be like to be a refugee. Makes you think about what you would do if you had no country, no family, no posessions and no where to go. You also realize you can be a refugee from yourself.

[Heidi Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. I picked up the book on the basis of the title, and the story did not disappoint. One reviewer says, "To be savored like the dark intensity of Turkish coffee." I agree. It's poetic and evocative. I loved it.

[Sandy Reisenauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

holly Payne is a new favorite of mine. this is the story of a young american girl going to teach english in a refugee camp .

[Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

a good book, but i didn't enjoy it....if that makes any sense.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved it. I thought the story was great, the charecters were interesting, but the transitions could have been smoother.

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just couldn't get into it.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this one in a little hotel book exchange. could not have been more pleased!

[erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, but the amount of typos was distracting and as others have mentioned it was definitely a bit predictable.

[Jamie Holloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful book.

[Dawn Fortenberry · Rating 3 out of 5]

three young people - a young composer, a child drummer and a young woman from the US learn to face their demons while navigating the war in Hungary during the early 1990's. well written. i enjoyed it but find it hard to describe.

[McKenna Swearingen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a beautiful and sad account of pain and suffering for refugees in the 90s. There are a few different paths that are followed and each is fulfilling in their description of the human condition dealing with pain and grief.

[Jessi Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the characters so much, and I appreciate the heart of the matter and the intent of the story. However, the writing style felt rough, even awkward in places.

[Elizabeth Standaert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really glad I cam across this book about a time I haven’t read much about!

[Mavis Ros]

DNF at 6%

It was okay at first but it gets tiring and frustrating to read the writing format that I wasn’t familiar with.

[Jasmin Gentry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally. Expect trauma in a book about a woman taking a job teaching English to wat refugees, said the woman who was smacked in the face with unexpected trauma.

[S-Haq · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's a good one!

the plot is really intersting..