Scissors, Paper, Stone: A Novel

by Martha K. Davis

Overview

This novel following a Korean adoptee, her white mother, and her best friend through two decades is “an intense and compelling read . . . terrific” (Kirkus Reviews). 
 
What is considered a family, and who gets to define it? In 1964, as racial tension simmers in America, Catherine and Jonathan adopt a baby girl from Korea. This unconventional choice brings disapproval from Catherine’s family—which creates an even closer bond between her and her daughter.
 
Narrated in alternating chapters by Catherine, her adopted daughter Min, and Min’s best friend Laura, Scissors, Paper, Stone spans twenty years of love, loss, and the complex reality of female relationships. As Min grows up, we watch as she comes out as a lesbian and learns to embrace her heritage, and after she and Laura take a summer road trip together, the shifts in their friendship force all three women to examine the assumptions they’ve been living by and to make choices about the roles they want to play in each other’s lives.
 
“Davis writes with rare insight and compassion about the evolving American family and the struggle to belong . . . a wise and affecting novel.” ―Hilma Wolitzer, author of An Available Man

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597092487
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	09/30/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	850 KB

About the Author

Martha K. Davis is a writer, editor, and teacher living in San Diego, California. Her short stories and essays have appeared in CALYX, The Gay & Lesbian Review, River Styx, Stone Canoe, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University.

Editorial Reviews

"A compelling family drama resonant with feminist and queer issues, Martha K. Davis’s Scissors, Paper, Stone neatly captures the grit of intimacy as relationships expand and contract...Davis sustains a beautiful tension between the women. Despite all that distances them, they’re in each other’s lives for good or ill. Like the children’s game of the title, they come together, face off, and drift apart, though at heart they’re a set, compelled to find the parts that complete it in each other, even if their connections are attended by confrontation." —Foreword Reviews

LITERARY / LGBT FICTION - Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers

Review of SCISSORS, PAPER, STONE from Amos Lassen Reviews

Amos Lassen

With Scissors, Paper, Stone, Martha K. Davis has given us an ambitious coming of (lesbian) age story that is a movingly honest inquiry into the messy, yet still beautiful, transmogrification of what it means to be a family in a post–WWII America ruptured by racism, homophobia, . . . and the generational divide. The character of Cathy, the idealistic and unsuspecting . . . single mother of an adopted Korean child, is one for the ages: a vessel for all the good intentions and fumbling contradictions of her time.”—Celeste Gainey, author of the GAFFER, final judge for the 2016 Quill Award

“Martha K. Davis writes with rare insight and compassion about the evolving American family and the struggle to belong. Scissors, Paper, Stone is a wise and affecting novel.”—Hilma Wolitzer, author of The Doctor's Daughter and An Available Man

From the Publisher

2018-02-06
Questions of identity are bound to arise when children of color are adopted by white parents.Korea-born Min is adopted by white Americans Catherine and Jonathan in 1964 when she's just a few months old; they try to nurture and love her as best they can, but race nags. Catherine's younger brother, Andy, for one, will barely look at Min and, in a particularly explosive fight, declares that he will never accept the child as his niece. Worse, he tells his sister that he believes the adoption should never have taken place. "She's not really yours," he says. "I've got nothing against Orientals, but you can never even pretend that she's your own." Andy, sadly, is not the only person to react this way, but it's his rejection that stings Catherine the most. As Andy's hateful words penetrate, they slowly undermine Catherine's confidence as a parent. It's brutal, if beautifully wrought. Indeed, as the novel unfolds and Min comes of age, we crash head-on into the sometimes-subtle and sometimes-overt bigotry that she experiences. The story is told in the alternating voices of Catherine, Min, and Min's longtime best friend, Laura, and covers 21 years, from 1964 to '85. Set in the predominantly white San Francisco suburb in which the family lives, it addresses numerous additional topics—Min's coming out as a lesbian, her parents' divorce, the creation of dozens of LGBTQ institutions that developed to challenge homophobia, and the difficulties that all young people face as they attempt to navigate long-term relationships. Min's sexuality—some scenes are pretty graphic—and the tensions that arise between her and Catherine combine to make the novel an intense and compelling read.A terrific bildungsroman featuring three women who are by turns fascinating and bewildering but ultimately worth championing.

Kirkus Reviews