Drumbeats

Drumbeats is the first novel in a trilogy and follows 18 year old English student Jess through her gap year in West Africa. It's a rite of passage novel set in the mid-1960s when Jess flees her stifling home background for freedom to become a volunteer teacher and nurse in the Ghanaian bush. Apprehensively, she leaves her first real romantic love behind in the UK, but will she be able to sustain the bond while she is away? With the idealism of youth, she hopes to find out who she really is, and do some good in the world, but little does she realise what, in reality, she will find that year: joys, horrors, tragedy. She must find her way on her own and learn what fate has in store for her, as she becomes embroiled in the poverty and turmoil of a small war-torn African nation under a controversial dictatorship. Jess must face the dangers of both civil war and unexpected romance. Can she escape her past or will it always haunt her?


Purchase Link

http://myBook.to/Drumbeatstrilogy

 

Acclaimed award-winning author Dr Julia Ibbotson is fascinated by the medieval world and concepts of time travel. She studied English at Keele University, specialising in early medieval language, literature and history, and has a PhD in socio-linguistics. She wrote her first novel at age 10, but became a school teacher, then an academic as a university lecturer and researcher. Julia spent a turbulent but exciting time in Ghana, West Africa, teaching and nursing. She has published both academic works and fiction, including a medieval time-slip, a children’s novel , a memoir, and the Drumbeats trilogy (which begins in Ghana in the 1960s). Apart from insatiable reading, Julia loves world travel, choral singing, swimming, yoga, and walking in the UK and Madeira where she and her husband divide their time. She runs an editing/critiquing service for authors: details on her website at http://www.juliaibbotsonauthor.com She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Historical Novel Society and the Romantic Novelists' Association.
As an academic, she has published many academic papers and books, mainly about gendered leadership and management issues and socio-linguistics. Her focus is now on writing novels which was her first love.

My Review

I thoroughly enjoyed reading a book that is different from the usual run of the mill. In Drumbeats we follow the journey of eighteen-year-old Jess, who against her parents' wishes, embarks on a gap year as a volunteer nurse in West Africa. Set in the sixties, we get to look at the political climate of Ghana at that time seen through the eyes of a young Western girl. Even Jess though could not have foreseen what a journey she will undertake. Facing civil war, a controversial dictatorship and the stirrings of romance, this is a kind of coming of age novel as she discovers what exactly she is made of. I totally admire Jess for doing her own thing and shaking off her restrictive background to emerge from her chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly ready to take her place in the world.