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Travelling Light
A novel on human trafficking by the author of the award-winning novel SAZZAE, whose work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2011. TRAVELLING LIGHT presents slavery in the form of a thrilling suspense by welcoming readers to Styxos, the newest EU accession candidate, head over heels in modernization as investment pours in. Travelling light to this remote island 'paradise', Mac finds herself trapped on the lowest level of society with only the ghost of a call girl in her entourage. She befriends Farouk, a French businessman derailed from his ensuing marriage when he is implicated in the murder of a call girl at a highbrow investors' gala.Will Mac become one of the 27 million modern-day slaves (see UN web site) who fall victim to human trafficking rings? Can Farouk escape a journey into instinct and extend the benefits of civilization to this newest EU accession state? Watch Mac in the company of this charming connoisseur with more to lose than an infrastructure bid.
316 pages, Paperback
First published February 25, 2011
About the author
J.L. Morin
9 books59 followersJL Morin grew up in inner-city Detroit. She proffered moral support while her parents sacrificed all to a failed system. Wondering what the Japanese were doing right, she decamped to Tokyo. Her debut Japan novel, Sazzae, won an eLit Gold Medal, and a Living Now Book Award. Her second novel, Travelling Light, was a USA Best Book Awards finalist, and her third, Trading Dreams, became ‘Occupy’s first bestselling novel’. Her climate fiction novel, Nature’s Confession, won first place in the Dante Rossetti Book Awards; a Readers’ Favorite Book Award; a LitPick 5-Star Review Award; and an excerpt received an Honorable Mention in the Eco-Fiction Story Contest, published in the Winds of Change anthology of eco-fiction. Her second cli-fi novel, Loveoid, is a Cygnus Sci-fi 1st place winner, among others.
Her cli-fi novels are on course syllabi at many universities. Ivy League professors have facilitated discussions with JL Morin’s writing, and it is discussed in textbooks, such as Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach, by Andrew Milner, and J. R. Burgmann, 2020, published by Oxford University Press.
Her most recent work, Tuck-a-tuck Dragon, is a diverse rhyming children’s book illustrated by children throughout their childhood from the ages of 2–21.
JL Morin’s writing draws on a breadth of experience. She traded derivatives in New York while studying nights for her MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business; worked for the Federal Reserve Bank posted to the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center; presented the news as a TV broadcaster; and she is adjunct faculty at Boston University. Morin’s fiction has appeared in The Harvard Advocate and Harvard Yisei, and her articles and translations in The Huffington Post, Library Journal, The Detroit News, European Daily, Livonia Observer Eccentric Newspapers, The Harvard Crimson, and Agence France Presse while she worked in their Middle East Headquarters.
Her cli-fi novels are on course syllabi at many universities. Ivy League professors have facilitated discussions with JL Morin’s writing, and it is discussed in textbooks, such as Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach, by Andrew Milner, and J. R. Burgmann, 2020, published by Oxford University Press.
Her most recent work, Tuck-a-tuck Dragon, is a diverse rhyming children’s book illustrated by children throughout their childhood from the ages of 2–21.
JL Morin’s writing draws on a breadth of experience. She traded derivatives in New York while studying nights for her MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business; worked for the Federal Reserve Bank posted to the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center; presented the news as a TV broadcaster; and she is adjunct faculty at Boston University. Morin’s fiction has appeared in The Harvard Advocate and Harvard Yisei, and her articles and translations in The Huffington Post, Library Journal, The Detroit News, European Daily, Livonia Observer Eccentric Newspapers, The Harvard Crimson, and Agence France Presse while she worked in their Middle East Headquarters.
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August 27, 2011"Wire stories have a life of their own as journalists from all over add pieces to them for as long as the item is newsworthy…Grushenka was travelling light over the IPA wire."
Mackenzie moves with her family to the seemingly idyllic Greek isle called Styxos, the native land of her husband, Charon. The trouble begins with the discovery of the body of a Russian prostitute who is found face down in the pool at a high-end party. Her name is Grushenka, and she turns out to only be a miniscule part in a major human trafficking operation. Farouk, an enigmatic French business man, is a suspect.
Mackenzie’s marriage is in itself a tight rope walk as she tries to deal with the gradual sinister changes in her husband. Simultaneously, the charm of the island itself is beginning to fade and, for Mac, it’s becoming a dangerous place. She tries to traverse a terrain of corruption to find out the truth about Grushenka and others like her while trying cope with her husbands suspected betrayal in a place where foreigners are not always welcome. From corrupt government officials to Russian gangsters, from national conflicts driven by religion and politics to domestic ones driven by broken trust, Travelling Light definitely takes you on a very enlightening journey.
I think Morin successfully created a nightmarish quality in her novel that haunted me long after I finished reading the last page. However, the scariest part is not the work of fiction itself, but the reality of human trafficking. If you live in the Caribbean like I do, when you think about slavery your mind automatically makes that leap to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet at the very beginning of the book Morin provides us with a very dispiriting fact:
"Slavery has endured into modern times. There are now at least twice as many real slaves on earth as there were at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the late 1700’s."
For me, that quote pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
While reading, there were times when I got the sense that Mac operated less like a character and more like view finder in which the reader is able to connect with the social issues plaguing Styxos. Through her eyes you see continuous attempts to try to sweep the human trafficking issue under the carpet and it is only through the tenacity of Mac and the Ladies’ Consortium that the issue is constantly kept in the forefront of your mind:
"If it were black or Jewish people being enslaved, they would stand together and fight. What is it about women that makes us look the other way?"
is interested in finding the gateway to Hades, but in sense she is already there; I mean if the obvious symbolic connection to her husband’s name doesn’t convince you, just consider the horrors that she and the 40,000 sex workers who are brought to Styxos every year have to face.
I thought it was a great novel for it’s narrative style that sometimes takes on a very didactic tone and I certainly feel more aware about a serious issue that I practically knew nothing about before. I definitely look forward to reading more by J.L. Morin or anything more from Harvard Square Editions for that matter.
K @ BaffledBooks
Mackenzie moves with her family to the seemingly idyllic Greek isle called Styxos, the native land of her husband, Charon. The trouble begins with the discovery of the body of a Russian prostitute who is found face down in the pool at a high-end party. Her name is Grushenka, and she turns out to only be a miniscule part in a major human trafficking operation. Farouk, an enigmatic French business man, is a suspect.
Mackenzie’s marriage is in itself a tight rope walk as she tries to deal with the gradual sinister changes in her husband. Simultaneously, the charm of the island itself is beginning to fade and, for Mac, it’s becoming a dangerous place. She tries to traverse a terrain of corruption to find out the truth about Grushenka and others like her while trying cope with her husbands suspected betrayal in a place where foreigners are not always welcome. From corrupt government officials to Russian gangsters, from national conflicts driven by religion and politics to domestic ones driven by broken trust, Travelling Light definitely takes you on a very enlightening journey.
I think Morin successfully created a nightmarish quality in her novel that haunted me long after I finished reading the last page. However, the scariest part is not the work of fiction itself, but the reality of human trafficking. If you live in the Caribbean like I do, when you think about slavery your mind automatically makes that leap to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet at the very beginning of the book Morin provides us with a very dispiriting fact:
"Slavery has endured into modern times. There are now at least twice as many real slaves on earth as there were at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the late 1700’s."
For me, that quote pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
While reading, there were times when I got the sense that Mac operated less like a character and more like view finder in which the reader is able to connect with the social issues plaguing Styxos. Through her eyes you see continuous attempts to try to sweep the human trafficking issue under the carpet and it is only through the tenacity of Mac and the Ladies’ Consortium that the issue is constantly kept in the forefront of your mind:
"If it were black or Jewish people being enslaved, they would stand together and fight. What is it about women that makes us look the other way?"
is interested in finding the gateway to Hades, but in sense she is already there; I mean if the obvious symbolic connection to her husband’s name doesn’t convince you, just consider the horrors that she and the 40,000 sex workers who are brought to Styxos every year have to face.
I thought it was a great novel for it’s narrative style that sometimes takes on a very didactic tone and I certainly feel more aware about a serious issue that I practically knew nothing about before. I definitely look forward to reading more by J.L. Morin or anything more from Harvard Square Editions for that matter.
K @ BaffledBooks
September 15, 2011
This book was a voyage of discovery for me, and the place I visited was a realm of mature female sexuality that previously I'd only observed from the outside. Practically all of the contemporary fiction I've read has been from either a male or an omniscient point of view. J. L. Morin's first-person narrator, Mackenzie, is a fully seen American woman of what to me -- whose connoisseurship dates from the middle of the last century -- is a post-modern generation of worldly-competent janes-of-all-trades. (Morin's own bio mentions currency derivatives, an MBA, TV news and marriage to a diplomat.)
The novel is the whole record of Mackenzie's marriage to Charon, a distant and somewhat hostile member of the intelligentsia of Styxos, a Mediterranean island in the process of being integrated into the European Union. There's a maguffin in this picture, an offbeat one: the mouth of Hades, somewhere on the island, according to legend, and the object of an archeological dig that provides part-time work for Mackenzie, otherwise occupied with raising two small children. The maguffin makes its appearance eventually, at the end of a couple of years of ambiguous struggle with the increasingly remote and abusive Charon, during which Mackenzie finds herself crusading against a large but barely visible ring of traffickers in women and girls thrown on the economy of the West by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Morin's Mackenzie is a vivid and vivacious protagonist, judiciously aware of the power of her sexuality and fully in charge of it. The voice sparkles. Travelling Light suffers, though, from chancy editing and proofing -- enough from time to time to cause the reader to stumble over the sense. Too bad, because the story is engaging, the characters attract, and Morin can make you laugh when she wants you to. I intend to read her other stuff.
The novel is the whole record of Mackenzie's marriage to Charon, a distant and somewhat hostile member of the intelligentsia of Styxos, a Mediterranean island in the process of being integrated into the European Union. There's a maguffin in this picture, an offbeat one: the mouth of Hades, somewhere on the island, according to legend, and the object of an archeological dig that provides part-time work for Mackenzie, otherwise occupied with raising two small children. The maguffin makes its appearance eventually, at the end of a couple of years of ambiguous struggle with the increasingly remote and abusive Charon, during which Mackenzie finds herself crusading against a large but barely visible ring of traffickers in women and girls thrown on the economy of the West by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Morin's Mackenzie is a vivid and vivacious protagonist, judiciously aware of the power of her sexuality and fully in charge of it. The voice sparkles. Travelling Light suffers, though, from chancy editing and proofing -- enough from time to time to cause the reader to stumble over the sense. Too bad, because the story is engaging, the characters attract, and Morin can make you laugh when she wants you to. I intend to read her other stuff.
August 14, 2011
"A more shrewd editor could possibly salvage Travelling Light; cutting characters, chunks of boggy dialogue, and pointless subplots could allow the bigger issues discussed to shine." (Excerpt from full review of Travelling Light at For Books' Sake)
April 15, 2011
Sad to say I couldn't finish this one...I'd love to see other reviews for it.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews