In contrast, her daughter Sue verges on too independent, a divorced single mother with whom Shoko has a distanced relationship at best. Half a century later, Shoko is living in California – as Charlie’s wife, she’s been an American more than twice as long as she’s been Japanese. Her son, Mike, is himself already middle-aged, although he’s back living at home. She had already fallen in love with the wrong man, barely survived losing him, and she needed to be practical. But with war came the American military, including Charlie who Shoko’s father chose for her to marry when she presented him with the photographs of all her potential suitors. Had World War II not decimated her country, Shoko would have had a very different life. While the novel might get labeled beach-read or chick-lit, How to Be has some serious heft, exploring and exposing ethnic, cultural, generational, societal, gender, and religious disconnects – yup, all that and more! Okay, I confess the cover put me off from opening the book for months (well, actually, years) I recently compromised by choosing to go aural and was surprisingly delighted to spend almost eight hours with narrators Laural Merlington and Emily Durante (who take turns reading as mother and daughter) I must be totally mellowing in my old age because I only cringed a few times over the less-than-accurate Japanese pronunciation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |