Cultures collide and sometimes meld in an assured debut.
The past spills out into history and encroaches on the future in Japanese-born, Boston-based writer Serizawa’s first book of short stories.
Two poles dominate Serizawa’s short fiction: Japan and the U.S. (California in particular). One historical event looms over both: the war between Japan and the U.S. in the 1940s, an event that, she writes in an author’s note, “didn’t start and end with specific people and events; its roots reach back to values seeded long ago, and its sundering effects have hardly lost their spark and propulsion.” Her characters aren’t always sure what those values are. One woman, resolutely of the present moment in the era of “Neoliberal Self-Destruction,” disappears at the end of a looping mystery, perhaps a member, perhaps the very embodiment, of a group called Bakteria, which “leaked a trove of undeclassified material related to a Japanese bacteriological warfare unit from the Second World War, whose crimes the U.S. government had notoriously helped cover up, shielding its members in exchange for their data harvested from human experimentation.” Was her disappearance a prank, a kidnapping, a CIA plot, an act of terrorism? We’re left to guess. In another story, some of the last pilots of the Imperial Army, knowing that they won’t return, lift off into the sky to “meet several hundred enemy fighters,” dutifully plunging like so many Icaruses into the ocean. A Japanese woman recalls the hoods that she and her neighbors wore to protect themselves from American firebombing: “they were just padded pieces of cloth, another thing our government cooked up. Still, we put them on, you know, half of us running around with our hoods on fire.” Serizawa writes elegantly if matter-of-factly of the horrific and the nostalgic alike, as when one narrator recalls a childhood visit to her grandparents in Japan, learning an ancient ritual: “clapping her hands three times and pressing her palms together, eyes closed, a prayer for Fuji-san, his mountain god. Keeper of health.”
Cultures collide and sometimes meld in an assured debut.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54537-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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