An impressive use of one family to intimately portray the history of social and cultural changes over three generations.
Spanning nearly 60 years, this work of historical fiction chronicles the multitude of cultural changes in Japan after World War II from the perspective of a conflicted family of three.
Labeled a “half-fiction” by its author, Yumiko’s debut takes place in postwar Japan, depicting a once-militaristic country rushing toward Western modernization. Hisaharu and his wife, Misao, (based on the author’s own parents) face great hardship in this new, ever shifting culture, both having grown up in small villages before the fall of Japan’s militarism in which their own ancestors’ histories had only begun to transform into legends. They have one child, a reserved girl named Jericho, and the family finds itself regularly uprooted by Hisaharu’s poorly paying position in Japan’s new, stigmatized Defense Force. Paralleling the family, Japan itself remains unsettled, with communism spreading rapidly among its neighbors while Western ideas conflicting with the shriveling tenants of traditional lifestyle begin to alter views on religion, agriculture, and the roles of women in this new society. The novel deftly limns its protagonist; though Hisaharu’s life is used as the story’s framing device, it still portrays him realistically—a thoughtful but not unimpeachable devourer of books with a work ethic cultivated from traditional thinking. Misao is also tied to the past. Her upbringing during wartime grants her spirit and inner strength while at the same time limiting her ability to adjust to new times. And when her parents’ stubbornness gets somewhat tiresome, Jericho subtly changes tack. Even characters who appear fleetingly—an ill-prepared American missionary, a sexually broken classmate, a disheveled teacher, and so many more—both accentuate and stand separate from Japanese history. Those unfamiliar with postwar Japan will find the story approachable and informative with its engaging core centered on the difficulties of raising a child in a changing world.
An impressive use of one family to intimately portray the history of social and cultural changes over three generations.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1490863399
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of...
Rosner’s debut novel is a World War II story with a Room-like twist, one that also deftly examines the ways in which art and imagination can sustain us.
Five-year-old Shira is a prodigy. She hears entire musical passages in her head, which “take shape and pulse through her, quiet at first, then building in intensity and growing louder.” But making sounds is something Shira is not permitted to do. She and her mother, Róża, are Jews who are hiding in a barn in German-occupied Poland. Soldiers have shot Róża’s husband and dragged her parents away, and after a narrow escape, mother and daughter cower in a hayloft day and night, relying on the farmer and his wife to keep them safe from neighbors and passing patrols. The wife sneaks Shira outside for fresh air; the husband visits Róża late at night in the hayloft to exact his price. To keep Shira occupied and quiet the rest of the time, Róża spins tales of a little girl and a yellow bird in an enchanted but silent garden menaced by giants; only the bird is allowed to sing. But when Róża is offered a chance to hide Shira in an orphanage, she must weigh her daughter’s safety against her desire to keep the girl close. Rosner builds the tension as the novel progresses, wisely moving the action out of the barn before the premise grows tired or repetitive. This is a Holocaust novel, but it’s also an effective work of suspense, and Rosner’s understanding of how art plays a role in our lives, even at the worst of times, is impressive.
A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of music.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17977-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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