A multilayered exploration of Asian American identity hampered by too much literary artifice.
In a debut memoir, the daughter of an Okinawan Vietnam War bride and an American soldier grapples with her complex familial roots.
Brina’s doting father once told her: “Ask me the time and I’ll give you the history of watchmaking.” The author shows a similar tendency to overelaborate in this heartfelt but meandering account of her effort to understand what it means to be an Okinawan American whose mother was born on an island most Westerners only know as the site of a World War II battle. Growing up in the mostly White suburb of Fairport, New York, Brina heard confusing racist slurs. “When I was growing up,” she writes, “White was always what I strived to be, and White always felt just beyond reach. Except I already was White. White was how I viewed the world, looked out at the world, no matter what the world saw when it looked back at me.” Such paradoxes fostered shame, guilt, and an anger toward her lonely mother, who often inadvertently embarrassed her. In adulthood, the author saw links between her family’s conflicts and the tortured past of Okinawa—claimed by turns by the Chinese, Japanese, and Americans—and visited the island with her parents, which helped her reconcile with her mother. Her account of her transformation is lyrical and well observed, and the author is to be commended for her dedication to excavating family history. However, despite the poetic flourishes, the text is too overburdened with literary contrivances, including first-person plural narration (used too frequently, it becomes disorienting), abrupt changes from present to past tense, and nonlinear chronology; one chapter has more than 40 shifts back and forth in time. Especially disorienting is a section that purports to reveal thoughts of a subordinate of Commodore Matthew Perry without revealing the sources for its material or the degree to which it has been fictionalized.
A multilayered exploration of Asian American identity hampered by too much literary artifice.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65734-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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