Emma's Review: The Girl from Jonestown by Sharon Maas

Reviewed by Emma Crowley  

When journalist Zoe Quint loses her husband and child in a tragic accident, she returns home to Guyana to heal. But when she hears cries and music floating through the trees, her curiosity compels her to learn more about the Americans who have set up camp in a run-down village nearby. Their leader, Jim Jones, dark eyed and charismatic, claims to be a peaceful man who has promised his followers paradise.

But everything changes when Zoe meets one of his followers, a young woman called Lucy, in a ramshackle grocery store. Lucy grabs Zoe’s arm, raw terror in her eyes, and passes her a note with a phone number, begging her to call her mother in America.

Zoe is determined to help Lucy, but locals warn her to stay away from the camp, and as sirens and gunshots echo through the jungle at nightfall, she knows they are right. But she can’t shake the frightened woman’s face from her mind, and when she discovers that there are young children kept in the camp, she has to act fast.

Zoe’s only route to the lost people is to get close to their leader, Jim Jones. But if she is accepted, will she be able to persuade the frightened followers to risk their lives and embark on a perilous escape under the cover of darkness? And when Jim Jones hears of her plans, could she pay the highest price of all?

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Many thanks to Bookouture via NetGalley for my copy of The Girl from Jonestown to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when Sharon Maas is writing about her home country of Guyana her writing really comes alive. Several of her latest books have been set in Europe during World War Two and although they were good stories, at times I felt there was a little disconnect between the author and the subject matter but The Girl from Jonestown returns to a familiar setting for the author and you can tell how much despite the horrors of the subject matter that she did enjoy writing this story and that she was on familiar territory and was confident with her subject matter and knew she could so the story justice

Guyana is a South American country that I had known virtually nothing about until I started reading books by this talented author. But you instantly feel at home in this tropical setting thanks to the vivid descriptions and brilliant use of imagery that help both the setting and the plot jump off the pages. The heat, the jungle, the primitive conditions, the unusual animals and the strange goings on all combine alongside the main thread of the plot to make for a very heightened, tense read that at times is very dark given the subject matter but it’s one that sucks you in little by little.

The book is based on a true story but of course the author has created her own characters and used some liberties in her retelling of the events that led to a mass suicide of over 900 people at the Jonestown compound deep in the Guyanan jungle. I didn’t know anything about this prior to starting this book. Before I delved too deep into the story I did some googling just to get some background information on what actually happened and why and it helped me with regard how to Sharon Maas wrote the story. 

It’s September 1978 and Lucy Sparks is secretly writing an account of her time at Jonestown which is led by Jim Jones. To outsiders it’s a paradise providing shelter from the ravages of the world but dig a little deeper and all is not as it seems and the residents who are more like inmates are certainly not happy. Yet they can’t express this because the repercussions don’t bare thinking about. They were promised a paradise but instead they found themselves trapped in a world of rules and regulations and brainwashing. But Lucy can see through everyone especially Jim and his second in command Moira and she knows that the White Night is coming and what will occur on this night will be horrific and life changing. Lucy needs help to escape but who will believe her? Will she be reunited with her family?

There are chapters from Lucy’s point of view which recount her time in the camp and detail the point she is at now and these are informative and do push the story forward but to be honest despite Lucy’s situation as a character she didn’t capture my attention fully. Yes, what she was experiencing was awful and Jim Jones had a persona of someone doing good for the world and saving the ostracised in society from the evils they were enduring but really he was a cult leader who controlled, possessed and dominated people for his own power and pleasure. But it’s the other main female character Zoe Quint who I was fully engrossed in from the first moment we encounter her. I presume she is some relative to the Quint family that have featured in the author’s previous books but I’d have to go back and do a little digging to find out as specifics allude me at this time. But I thought Zoe was a fantastically written character from beginning to end and I couldn’t get enough of the chapters where she featured and her role become more dominant the further the story progressed.

Zoe returns to Guyana after having spent several years travelling the world following a great tragedy in her life which is slowly revealed to the reader. She wants to go back to nature, to peace and quiet and to wholesome things and hopefully get back to writing properly and publish a book about her travels. She had been a journalist for a national newspaper so she is always on the lookout for a story. She is inquisitive and like a dog with a bone when she gets her teeth into something. Once she gets a sniff of something untoward she is on the case and never rests on her laurels until she gets to the bottom of things. She needs to wash away the sorrow and soothe the wounds that refuse to heal and by travelling deep into the jungle where her Aunt and Uncle live she feels she will be away from all distractions and the hole that is deep in her heart may start to close. But as she lies in the hut in the farm grounds, each night she hears strange noises carried on the wind from upriver. She soon learns it’s an American settlement and the people in Jonestown are supposedly there because they want to be. When by pure chance she meets Lucy for a brief moment in the local shop, Lucy expresses her feelings in a rushed manner but Zoe certainly gets the message and she is determined to find out more about what goes behind the high fences that surround the settlement. Lucy wants out but can Zoe help her?

The settlement is a dark force that has coercion and manipulation at its centre and the evil is quickly gathering and intensifying and Lucy is determined to write an expose. The doors are shut in her face when she approaches the settlement but Zoe is strong and determined and she will fight for those downtrodden and oppressed. She asks the tough questions and tries to right so many wrongs but will it prove too much? Zoe and the reader are taken on a dark and dangerous yet exhilarating path and despite getting closer to Rex Bennett at the American embassy it’s like she is on a solo mission that by only completing herself will victory win out. Zoe knows in order to get to the heart of the story and to try and help Lucy and so many others, she needs to get to the centre of Jonestown and that is Jim Jones himself. She literally enters the lion’s den but in doing so is she just putting her own life in peril? Maybe there is no way to stop the forces at work which are gathering momentum the more paranoia regarding governments and the outside world that sets in.

The last quarter or so of the book moved along at a cracking pace. It was really edge of your seat stuff with plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing right until the very last minute. The themes are murky and sombre with murder, massacre and mental manipulation at their core but at the same time there are elements of hope that shine through also. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Girl from Jonestown. To be honest I thought it was going to be really really heavy going and that it would plod along. Instead it was the opposite. Whilst reading this the book underwent a title change and the new title is definitely more apt. Sharon Maas has written an eye opening, shocking and gripping read that becomes very hard to put down.