JULY 2020 - AudioFile
Natalie Naudus brings thoughtful gravitas to the narration of Kimiko Guthrie’s debut, which depicts the collective trauma that the Japanese internment camps of WWII inflicted throughout generations of Japanese-Americans. Akiko “Jane” Thompson is at the center of this story, which alternates between the camps and present-day California. Jane has disconnected from her Japanese heritage, but when her life begins to disintegrate, she realizes she must confront the legacy of the camps if she is to heal. Naudus skillfully navigates between the novel’s two time periods, employing a low, bleak tone to describe the camps and heightened emotionality when communicating Jane’s increasing instability. Her characterizations are authentic and believable, and her ability to capture this novel’s unsettling atmosphere sets this audiobook apart. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
JULY 2020 - AudioFile
Natalie Naudus brings thoughtful gravitas to the narration of Kimiko Guthrie’s debut, which depicts the collective trauma that the Japanese internment camps of WWII inflicted throughout generations of Japanese-Americans. Akiko “Jane” Thompson is at the center of this story, which alternates between the camps and present-day California. Jane has disconnected from her Japanese heritage, but when her life begins to disintegrate, she realizes she must confront the legacy of the camps if she is to heal. Naudus skillfully navigates between the novel’s two time periods, employing a low, bleak tone to describe the camps and heightened emotionality when communicating Jane’s increasing instability. Her characterizations are authentic and believable, and her ability to capture this novel’s unsettling atmosphere sets this audiobook apart. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-04-13
A young woman is haunted by frightening phenomena in a debut novel about the lingering impact of WWII Japanese internment camps in the U.S.
Akiko, the book’s first-person narrator, has long been uncomfortable with her Japanese heritage on her mother’s side, changing her name to Jane as a girl and choosing not to speak Japanese with family. Now in her 30s, engaged to Shiro, Jane is adrift, unemployed, and worried that her mother, Sumi, seems to have disappeared again as she did in Jane’s teens. Jane can’t seem to connect with her in real life, although Sumi has a robust existence on social media. Meanwhile, Shiro, who works for the Transportation Security Administration at the Oakland airport, is so enraged by the racism and sexual harassment he sees on his job that he's secretly making and posting videos about it. As Jane frets about both of them, she is having disturbing dreams, or perhaps hallucinations, or maybe they are memories, but not all her own. She tells her story to a “you” whose identity is only gradually revealed. In brief third-person chapters, we learn about Sumi’s past: As a young child, she was interned with her family during World War II in camps in California and Arkansas, where a secret tragedy occurred. As Sumi drifts into cyberspace and Shiro sinks into paranoia, Jane’s sanity grows ever more tenuous, and the novel suffers from an overload of unreliable narrators. The prose is uneven, sometimes striking in its bizarre images, other times clunky in its exposition. But the surreal story and its linkage of past and present remain compelling even if the dark power they generate is undercut by an oddly cheery ending.
A 21st-century ghost story offers chills in this uneven but promising debut.
