A well-plotted and engaging historical novel.
Kamada’s debut novel chronicles the Miyota family’s imprisonment at two West Coast internment camps in the 1940s.
Ten-year-old Fumio Miyota and his family reside on a multigenerational farm in Bainbridge Island, Washington, where his life is comfortable and revolves around chores, school, and hours with his loyal dog, Flyer, and best friend, Zachary. However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, authorities invade the Japanese American family’s home and take some of the family’s cultural relics and belongings. Later, the family is sent to the Owens Valley Reception Center at Camp Manzanar in Lone Pine, California, and later imprisoned at Idaho’s Camp Minidoka. However, this book not only stresses the bigotry, injustice, and harsh treatment that the family experiences; it also expertly integrates the ways in which Fumio and his family find community in heartbreaking circumstances, including moments in which Fumio is able to thrive. The novel is organized into three parts by locale—Bainbridge Island; Lone Pine; and Hunt, Idaho—and offers an authentic account of the U.S. government’s horrific treatment of Japanese American people during the World War II era. It skillfully allows readers to grasp how Fumio, his family, and his community seek emotional and spiritual survival; some people use art, photography, and taiko drumming to capture time and find freedom and solace. The book’s varying perspectives are unusual, presenting both Fumio’s close third-person point of view and Flyer’s first-person perspective; the latter seems designed to engage younger readers. The author also weaves in an omniscient perspective to ground readers in the family’s home community. The book can feel long-winded at times, but it will likely endear young readers to its characters and their struggles.
A well-plotted and engaging historical novel.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68513-097-8
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella,...
A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel.
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella, but because the setup seems generic. A black soldier returns from the Korean War, where he faces a rocky re-entry, succumbing to alcoholism and suffering from what would subsequently be termed PTSD. Yet perhaps, as someone tells him, his major problem is the culture to which he returns: “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” Ultimately, the latest from the Nobel Prize–winning novelist has something more subtle and shattering to offer than such social polemics. As the novel progresses, it becomes less specifically about the troubled soldier and as much about the sister he left behind in Georgia, who was married and deserted young, and who has fallen into the employ of a doctor whose mysterious experiments threaten her life. And, even more crucially, it’s about the relationship between the brother and his younger sister, which changes significantly after his return home, as both of them undergo significant transformations. “She was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine,” thinks the soldier. He discovers that “while his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her.” As his sister is becoming a woman who can stand on her own, her brother ultimately comes to terms with dark truths and deep pain that he had attempted to numb with alcohol. Before they achieve an epiphany that is mutually redemptive, even the earlier reference to “dogs” reveals itself as more than gratuitous.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-59416-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A well-crafted spy novel examines the perils of espionage’s foundation in personal relationships.
The intriguing story of a young woman’s espionage career during World War II weaves in a critique of the British class system.
What sort of people got recruited to be spies by Britain’s famed MI5 intelligence agency during World War II? This absorbing historical novel makes clear they weren’t much like James Bond. Evelyn Varley is a restless young woman living in London in 1939, working for a cosmetics company and making no use at all of her Oxford degree in German, when she’s invited for a rather mysterious job interview. She rapidly goes from typing up reports to infiltrating a group of Nazi sympathizers—and discovering a disturbing personal connection. Starford takes an interesting tack with Evelyn’s background. The daughter of a clerk and a homemaker, she attended a posh boarding school as a scholarship girl, which meant she would either suffer bullies or remake herself in the images of the upper-class girls who harassed her. She chose the latter and did it so well she got into Oxford and became a sort of second daughter to the family of her best friend, Sally—a family that’s one of the wealthiest in England. When Evelyn goes to work for MI5, she discovers others who, like her, are outsiders in the rigid British class system but have found ways to assimilate by assuming an identity, an essential part of spycraft. As the war looms, the challenge for Evelyn is assimilating with people she finds abhorrent. Most of the novel is set in the years just before and after Britain’s entry into the war. Occasional chapters flash-forward to 1948, when Evelyn is trying to put her life back together after some unnamed catastrophe and tentatively falling in love. The book is rich with historical details, right down to clothing styles and furnishings. The plot sometimes slows amid those details, but most of the book is well paced. The novel’s depiction of Evelyn’s career is exciting, but it also suggests the human cost: No matter how skilled her performances, to those above her in the social hierarchy, she’s expendable.
A well-crafted spy novel examines the perils of espionage’s foundation in personal relationships.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-303788-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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