Overview

Tessa, K. Prater and Salodius Byrd's debut novel, was inspired by an actual person, Tessa Marie Horan. Tessa, raised in an unconventional family from the western United States, plans a journey to India and Nepal in search of spiritual and moral discipline after she completes her high school education. A few months before she departs, her brother experiences a life-changing injury that leaves him a paraplegic. The tone is set to weigh all the parts of her life as she is torn between Buddhist and familial obligation and devotion. On her journeys Tessa bears witness to the disparity of cultures, human trafficking, marginalization, and the destruction of our planet. While Tessa is in a remote village of the Himalayas, a young girl is sold by her family into servitude, and the pivotal point of Tessa's commitment and passion jettisons into deliberate motion. She begins a courageous journey to promote change in the world and enlists in the Peace Corps after her college education. Tessa is assigned to a far-flung village in the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga, where she becomes intimate with the science of people while integrating with the villagers. She contemplates the reasons she made a rebellious decision to leave her family of origin as her personal heritage surfaces. Tessa is in search of answers, clarity, and inextinguishable hope about the polarity of the world. She must face unintended consequences because of her choices.

Full Product Details

9781958711781

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Kristena Prater resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and began writing poetry at the age of eleven. She invented a personalized form of yoga called Chayo and practices a spiritual and moral discipline inspired by Buddhism. Prater has been an art therapist, mask maker, freelance writer, and death doula, and is the mother of four children and grandmother to six boys. She and Salodius Byrd have collaborated on this novel, which was created from the sequential organization of actuality that culminated in a fictitious narrative. Salodius Byrd lives in the Basque Country of Spain and spends several months a year in the United States and Canada. She prefers anonymity and has spent most of her adult life out of the limelight.She is a ghost writer. Through novellas, prose, poems, books, and articles that are a compendium of her layered experiences, she enjoys writing vicariously. Byrd avoids being photographed because her privacy is of utmost importance.She spent the past few years traveling and interviewing the siblings, extended family, and friends of Tessa, the remarkable young woman who spread inclusiveness and compassion like seeds wherever she went. Along the way, Byrd met many who were inspired by Tessa without having known her, but what makes Tessa so trenchant is how well Byrd knows Tessa's family and friends. To them all, she dedicates this story in their honor.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available