Publishers Weekly
02/25/2019
Kiefer’s sweeping novel (after One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place to Hide) examines the ways war shapes the lives of ordinary people. Upon returning to Placer County, Calif., after serving in Vietnam, John Frazier is at loose ends: 21 and gripped by recollections of violence and a drug habit he’s trying to kick, he’s unable to imagine his future. But when he runs into his long-lost aunt Evelyn Wilson, John is improbably sucked into the mystery of what happened to Ray Takahashi, Evelyn’s Japanese-American former neighbor, who disappeared soon after returning from WWII. With John in tow, Evelyn meets with Ray’s mother to reveal a secret she’s kept for 26 years—that, unbeknownst to Ray, Evelyn’s daughter, Helen, gave birth to his baby after he came back from the war. At Evelyn’s insistence, Helen gave up the infant to an orphanage partly due to the “disgrace” of a mixed-race child. As John grapples with his own ghosts, he investigates Ray’s life: his idyllic childhood growing up with the Wilson children, his romance with Helen, the Takahashi family’s transfer to an internment camp and the prejudice they encountered. After Evelyn exposes her secret, the sinister forces underlying Ray’s disappearance begin rising closer to the surface. Kiefer’s story sheds light on the prejudice violence ignites and on the Japanese-American experience during a fraught period of American history, and makes for engaging and memorable novel. (Apr.)
Deborah Donovan
"Haunting.... Ray’s poignant suffering is but one example of the bigotry and fear experienced by Japanese born U.S. citizens after Pearl Harbor, the same bigotry and fear of the other that still sadly exists in America today.... YA: Ray’s story of young love and loss as well as an often omitted aspect of WWII history will resonate with teens."
Luis Alberto Urrea
"Christian Kiefer is a masterful writer, and this magisterial novel is aching with beauty and power. This is a great book."
Naomi J. Williams
"Set in the golden foothills of the Sierra Nevada and spanning the middle decades of the twentieth century, Phantoms tells the intertwined stories of two families, two wars, and two soldiers trying to make their way home. Exploring the brutal legacies of racism and war with unflinching honesty and incandescent prose, this novel asks: Who gets to tell their stories, and who doesn’t? What if you’re entrusted with—or thrust into—someone else’s story? Who gets to find their way home?"
Kirstin Chen
"Christian Kiefer's Phantoms is a kaleidoscopic marvel. With each new chapter, Kiefer deftly turns the dial, shifting patterns and textures and hues, urging us to question assumptions and to reconsider old truths. In confronting the complex legacies of World War II and Vietnam, Kiefer has delivered a haunting story of the past that will make us see the present anew."
NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile
Listeners who enjoy a moving historical novel will appreciate Peter Berkrot’s narration as two California families are shaped by war, bigotry, and disastrously entangled relationships. Berkrot brings to life the Wilsons and Takahashis, whose lives are forever altered by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Takahashis, tenants of the Wilsons, are sent to an internment camp. Their trauma reverberates for decades to come. Berkrot gives a distinctive persona to each family's matriarch. Mrs. Wilson has a controlled, cold voice. Mrs. Takahashi has a quiet, dignified voice. She embodies the Buddhist virtue of gaman—enduring life’s tragedies with grace and patience. The writing is sonorous, evocative, and, at times, overblown, but it will resonate with listeners. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-01-21
Two families seek to make peace with their past as a young novelist attempts to overcome his war-tossed demons.
Kiefer (The Animals, 2015, etc.) begins his novel by introducing us to the achingly beautiful memory of Ray Takahashi, a young Japanese-American soldier returned from fighting for a country that had forced his family to abandon their home for an internment camp. He returns to the orchards of California, looking for his childhood sweetheart, Helen Wilson. Following this opening scene, we learn that the novel is, in fact, narrated by a different character, John Frazier, who, upon his return from a devastating tour in Vietnam in 1969, helps his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and their former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi, try to uncover, or keep covered, various sins and mysteries of the 1940s. To add another layer, Frazier, a novelist, is actually reflecting on the story in 1983, when he finally learns the truth about Ray's life. It's a complex narrative structure, but this allows Kiefer to constantly overlay past and present and to recognize, through John, the cycles in which his character, and in fact the country, remains trapped—cycles of racism, cycles of war, and cycles of young men who return home guilty of crimes, the full ramifications of which they couldn't possibly understand. Yet for all this, the novel—certainly anti-war, certainly condemning our country's dark past—is full of quavering beauty, unbreakable love, and fragile, relentless hope. "Sweet life," Kiefer-as-John writes to end these interlocking, deeply tragic stories. "Have you not been with me all the while?" In the hands of a writer as skilled and gifted as Kiefer, the answer can only be yes, for sweet life spills from every perfect word.
It will break your heart, and in the breaking, fill you with bittersweet but luminous joy.
