In a Land of Paper Gods

Author/Guide: Rebecca Mackenzie

Why a Booktrail?

1941: A child far from home and caught between two cultures,

ISBN: 978-1472224194
Genre: Religious

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What you need to know before your trail

Atop the fabled mountain of Lushan, celebrated for its temples, capricious mists and plunging ravines, perches a boarding school for the children of British missionaries. As her parents pursue their calling to bring the gospel to China’s most remote provinces, ten-year-old Henrietta S. Robertson discovers that she has been singled out for a divine calling of her own.

Etta is quick to share the news with her dorm mates, and soon even Big Bum Eileen is enlisted in the Prophetess Club, which busies itself looking for signs of the Lord’s intent. (Hark.) As rumours of war grow more insistent, so the girls’ quest takes on a new urgency – and in such a mystical landscape, the prophetesses find that lines between make believe and reality, good and bad, become dangerously blurred. So Etta’s pilgrimage begins.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Lianxi, Jiangxi, China

Lianxi is a district in Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China. It was formerly named Lushan District taking its name from Mount Lu, which was located inside its boundaries

At the time the novel opens, it’s four years into the Second Sino – Japanese war :

“The mountain was believed to be a sacred mountain and so far its inhabitants – the monks in the temple, the teachers and children in the missionary school, the villagers of Woosung, a hamlet in the valley below and the mountain chair men who threaded their way up the winding paths – all had been left in peace whilst the Reds stored north and the Japanese came inland along the Yangtze, Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan burning behind them”