A Year of Favor

By Julia MacDonnell

Recently, I just finished reading A Year of Favor by one of my former professors, Julia MacDonnell. I'm a bit late to the literary conversation for this one since it looks like it's now out of print, but the way she builds her story is truly something special. And there is a lot to be said about her careful skill of craft.

Julia hooks her readers with a rich opening chapter, introducing the uniquely mysterious voice of Elizabeth M. Guerrera, and then takes them behind the scenes of reporting the news and into the rich, fictional country of Bellavista. A place in the middle of a civil war. While the country itself is fictional, Julia approaches the setting with a careful eye to detail, constructing it in a way that it reads as if it were a real place with real-world problems.

This is something I’ve always found quite difficult when writing, as the larger the setting, the more time it takes to build. And the tougher it may seem to pass it off as realistic because the writer must have an incredibly clear vision of the location for the novel. He can’t rely on factual history to ground the backbone of the work’s believability the way he can if his story takes place in a real-life place. A fictional setting becomes part of the world of which a writer must convince his readers.

In Julia’s novel, her success with this only speaks to her talent as a writer as she takes the reader on an exploration of corruption and the power of government. Exploring what is real versus what is only reported by a corrupt government during war. The reader is left with a tangled web of what is truth, laden with touches of mysticism that beg the question, “what does it all mean?” Julia takes them along on the journey of discovery with Guerrera to an unforeseeable resolution.

They explore the facts as she collects them, see what stories result from her reporting, and cheer her on to the tell the truth behind the propaganda. The reader is left afterward to reflect on how a government can influence the facts to feed the public their version of what's true, how a news story that might not be as accurate as it should can turn gossip into fact, and the power of reporting someone's story.

If you can find a copy secondhand, folks, you should check out A Year of Favor. It's a wonderful read; I look forward to seeing how her talents further developed in her second novel Mimi Malloy, at Last.