December 15, 2024
Three generations of Seattle women navigate bigotry, politics, and scheming men. Kohnstamm's second novel opens with a setup that at first seems too thin to carry even a short story: In 2014, Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth has volunteered to run her children's elementary school PTA in hopes of renaming the school after her grandmother, Masako Hasegawa, a victim of Japanese American internment and a longtime music teacher there. But that small effort turns out to unlock a host of complications. It evokes the history of the school's original namesake, an East Coast settler who scammed the native tribes in the 1850s. It implicates an effort by another local, Bruce Jorgensen, to convert a nearby property into a pot dispensary--if only he can game the license-lottery system in his favor. It harks back to Sami's mother, Ruth Hasegawa, who endured Masako's strict upbringing in the 1970s even while pursuing a romance with Larry Dugdale, a ne'er-do-well who's pinned his future on a local aerospace company's plan to manufacture a fleet of supersonic passenger jets. And naturally, it goes all the way back to Masako herself, a passionate music teacher. Bouncing from the middle of the 19th century to the present day, Kohnstamm capably occupies the dynamic of characters in multiple eras while spotlighting commonalities--most prominently the complex (sometimes bigoted) bureaucracies of the city, and the stumblebum manner of men and get-rich-quick ideas. But Kohnstamm seems to be shooting for an epic scope that the novel never quite achieves, as it's generally stuck in the middle gear of chronicling sputtering relationships. That means some late-breaking dramas involving marriage, mental illness, and an attempted plane hijacking feel less persuasive. As a series of individual domestic dramas, it has liveliness and ironic humor. But its parts are less than its whole. A family saga whose execution doesn't quite match its ambition.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from February 1, 2025
Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth, an overworked and underappreciated mother of four, is experiencing existential malaise. Though she is the glue that keeps her family together, she has yet to fulfill a promise she made years earlier to her grandmother, Masako "May" Hasegawa, a local legend and influential music teacher, that the local school would one day bear Masako's name. When the school is slated for closure, Sami reflects on her family's history in the Seattle area and how place is central to one's identity. Kohnstamm masterfully fills in the backstory with multiple time lines, including the nineteenth-century story of Si'sia "Little Chief," later given the name Sam Dugdale by the "Bostons" who stole his family's land. Masako's experience in the 1950s as a young, single mother facing systemic racism is poignantly and movingly rendered. The characters are vividly three-dimensional with subtle psychological depth, for example, Masako's rebellious daughter, Ruth, who must balance familial expectations with finding herself, and Larry, a lovable yet loyal doofus besotted with Ruth. The dialogue frequently sings and is generously punctuated with clever wit, as best exemplified by Bruce, a modern hippie slacker and Sami's unlikely ally to save the school. Kohnstamm's remarkable achievement is to so effectively address race, class, culture, identity, and power in such a compelling, entertaining read.
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