JULY 2018 - AudioFile
Hana and Kei are mixed-race twins who were raised in Hawaii. Driven apart by tragedy, Hana settles in New York, as far as she can get from her sister and their memories. Narrator Christine Lakin draws listeners into this family drama involving a backdrop of historical horrors, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Her narration is full of feelings that reflect the precarious nature of immigrant identity in the 1940s. The contemporary themes in this story further engage listeners with the hardships of Lillie, the twins' mother. Lakin is a talented performer whose versatility allows her to portray grandmothers and children with equal vigor. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
03/26/2018
Rizzuto’s quasi-thriller turned weighty multigenerational saga follows three women facing debilitating illness, alienation, and extreme isolation against the backdrop of war and a devastating environmental catastrophe. As the novel opens in the early 1970s, 24-year-old half-Japanese, half-white Hana returns to her sparse New York City apartment to find her estranged twin sister, Kei, knocked out cold in the bathtub, apparently the victim of a break-in. Kei falls into a coma and is hospitalized, and as Hana tries to figure out what happened, she visits Kei and tells her stories about their childhood in 1950s and ’60s Hawaii, hoping it will help revive her. Of particular import are Hana’s recollections of competing for their mother’s attention, the time Kei nearly got swept away in a tsunami, and—the book’s finale—the terrifying event that drove the sisters apart. While the chapters told from Hana’s and Kei’s perspectives are mostly gripping, the story line that carries the most heft is a third from the perspective of their mother, Japanese-American Lillie, that takes place before the twins are born and explores anti-Japanese prejudice during World War II, the horrors of Japanese internment camps, and the bombing of Hiroshima (themes also explored in Rizzuto’s memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning). Though the book meanders a bit too much, it’s bolstered by its convincing historical detail and its satisfying characters. A well-paced page-turner it’s ultimately not, but Rizzuto’s ruminative portrait of a ravaged family on the precipice of forgiveness leaves a lasting impression. (May)
From the Publisher
"In this gripping tale of two sisters, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto probes, with great compassion, the heart-wrenching complexities of identity, memory, history, and survival."—Ruth Ozeki, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted & bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being
"A beautifully woven historical saga wrapped in a page-turning mystery, Shadow Child explores time, memory and identity,shedding new light on the lives of Japanese-Americans, and how trauma can be its own kind of inheritance. Not since Housekeeping has there been a pair of sisters so intricately linked as Hana and Kei, or settings that imprint so firmly on the mind, from the internment camps of WWII to the hidden caves and tropical waters of Hawaii. This is a stunning story of sisterhood and survival, of healing and forgiveness, and how we find our true selves in each other."—Hannah Tinti, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Thief and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
"Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Shadow Child is a beautiful, unafraid novel, a story of how history shapes and fractures identity in family. What is a self when one is a twin? What is a national identity in a time of war? How are we unknowingly shaped by the traumas of our parents? Essential questions are at the heart of Shadow Child, a novel that defies categorization- part historical, part mystery, part family love story-that is on every page masterfully wrought."—Victoria Redel, award-winning author of Before Everything
"The powerful generational inheritance of secrets, lies, guilt, remorse, and what we do in the name of love is at the heart of this wise, richly layered novel about family and forgiveness."—Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion and Hourglass
"Gripping...Bolstered by its convincing historical detail and its satisfying characters...Rizzuto's ruminative portrait of a ravaged family on the precipice of forgiveness leaves a lasting impression."—Publishers Weekly
"National Book Critics Circle finalist Rizzuto blends historical fiction and mystery into a haunting examination of identity and family in this perfect book club choice."—Library Journal (Starred Review)
"[An] impressive novel with a fierce velocity....The sisters, deeply linked and then estranged, are vividly realized as they come to terms with their mother, the traumas of what has divided them, and a generation of mysteries."—The National Book Review
"A good read...Suspense well-paced."—The International Examiner
"Beautifully written... highly entertaining... Rahna Reiko Rizzuto takes the reader to the dangerous landscape of Hawaii, to the Japanese internment camps during World War and the bombing of Hiroshima and ends the story in the streets of New York."—The Washington Book Review
Library Journal
07/01/2018
Dreading her twin sister Keiko's visit from Hawaii, Hanako deliberately delays returning to her Manhattan apartment, but when she does, she finds Kei in the shower, unconscious from a mysterious attack. While Kei lies comatose in the hospital, Hana recalls their inseparable, even interchangeable childhoods until adolescence cleaved them into good Hana and wild-child Kei. Their mother's and stepfather's deaths reunite them—at least in physical distance—but Hana must somehow bring Kei back from the darkness. Interspersed with the sisters' saga is Lillie's tragic story as a Japanese American woman imprisoned in Manzanar during World War II who is deported to Japan before war's end, horrifically losing loved ones in Hiroshima, but ultimately survives to return home to the United States. How the dual narratives are linked won't be surprising, and despite multiple red herrings, readers will probably intuit whodunit sooner rather than later. With such predictability, wading through more than 13 hours of psychological meandering risks devolving into tedium. VERDICT Perhaps Christine Lakin's narration could have been more engaging, her Japanese phrases and Hawaiian pidgin more consistent, the various characters more succinctly distinguished. That said, Rizzuto's (Hiroshima in the Morning) already uneven text limits opportunities for transformative aural enhancement. ["A haunting examination of identity and family": LJ 3/1/18 starred review of the Grand Central hc.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
JULY 2018 - AudioFile
Hana and Kei are mixed-race twins who were raised in Hawaii. Driven apart by tragedy, Hana settles in New York, as far as she can get from her sister and their memories. Narrator Christine Lakin draws listeners into this family drama involving a backdrop of historical horrors, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Her narration is full of feelings that reflect the precarious nature of immigrant identity in the 1940s. The contemporary themes in this story further engage listeners with the hardships of Lillie, the twins' mother. Lakin is a talented performer whose versatility allows her to portray grandmothers and children with equal vigor. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-03-06
A mother's traumas haunt her twin daughters, whose own intricate relationship further complicates an intense psychodrama.What begins as a thriller—who tried to strangle Hana Swanson's identical twin sister, Kei, found unconscious in the shower?—morphs rapidly into something far more melancholy and introspective in Rizzuto's (Hiroshima in the Morning, 2010, etc.) second novel. Narrated in multiple voices, it explores the sisters' contrasting identities and responses to their mother Lillie's experience as a Japanese-American during and after World War II. Lillie, an orphan, marries Donald, the son of Japanese immigrants, soon after the U.S. is attacked at Pearl Harbor. Soon, Lillie and her new family are relocated to Manzanar, a harsh internment camp, where she gives birth to a son, Toshi. Then, after Donald refuses to foreswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor, his father manages to get the family passage on a Swedish ship heading for Japan. The family settles in Hiroshima, where history will catch up with them. Lillie is a poisoned survivor of the atomic bomb, while Donald and Toshi disappear. Resettled in Hawaii after the war, Lillie gives birth to Hana and Kei, the good twin and the rebellious one, who sometimes swap identities or merge into a single personality, Koko, or can even seem to contain their lost brother, "two souls battling for the same body." Rizzuto's blurring of the twins' identities is perhaps the most interesting aspect of her relentlessly dark saga of loss, fear, guilt, alienation, and scarring (both physical and psychological). Hana's narration predominates, a broken account of an unhappy childhood leading to a withdrawn adulthood. Crises, revelations, and corrected misunderstandings fill the final chapters, offering some clarity but not much cheer.A long and winding fusion of sorrow and psychological processing.
