2. Shizuko's Daughter
Jul. 22nd, 2009 11:53 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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50books_pocShizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori.
This is a re-read for me, because I want to tell other people about how wonderful it is. It's by a Japanese-American author, and it is marketed as Young Adult.
This is the coming-of-age story of Yuki, a girl who grows up in Tokyo. Her life is permanently altered at the age of twelve by her mother's suicide. With clear, simple, beautiful prose that contains a lot of quiet emotion, the author follows Yuki through her teenage years as she deals with the loss and grows into a strong and resilient young woman; her own person.
Kyoko Mori has a talent for drawing characters that are full and real, and Yuki is a wonderful character. The chapters work as self-contained short stories within the whole, often based around a visual image or theme, and several of them were, in fact, published separately as short stories. Some of the chapters are narrated by other important characters in Yuki's life: her quietly unhappy mother, her distant father, her gentle maternal grandparents, her bitter step-mother. The author doesn't choose to make her characters villains or heroes, and the other perspectives add a lot to the reader's understanding of the family before and after Shizuko's death.
Have I made this book sound like a sad and depressing read? I really hope not, because though there is pain and loss in the story, there are equal amounts of joy and love. It's a beautiful book. It seems to have been published for the Young Adult age group, and I first read it at this age, but it contains enough richness and depth for adults too.
This is a re-read for me, because I want to tell other people about how wonderful it is. It's by a Japanese-American author, and it is marketed as Young Adult.
This is the coming-of-age story of Yuki, a girl who grows up in Tokyo. Her life is permanently altered at the age of twelve by her mother's suicide. With clear, simple, beautiful prose that contains a lot of quiet emotion, the author follows Yuki through her teenage years as she deals with the loss and grows into a strong and resilient young woman; her own person.
Kyoko Mori has a talent for drawing characters that are full and real, and Yuki is a wonderful character. The chapters work as self-contained short stories within the whole, often based around a visual image or theme, and several of them were, in fact, published separately as short stories. Some of the chapters are narrated by other important characters in Yuki's life: her quietly unhappy mother, her distant father, her gentle maternal grandparents, her bitter step-mother. The author doesn't choose to make her characters villains or heroes, and the other perspectives add a lot to the reader's understanding of the family before and after Shizuko's death.
Have I made this book sound like a sad and depressing read? I really hope not, because though there is pain and loss in the story, there are equal amounts of joy and love. It's a beautiful book. It seems to have been published for the Young Adult age group, and I first read it at this age, but it contains enough richness and depth for adults too.
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Date: 2009-07-23 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-24 02:25 am (UTC)It stood up really well as a re-read for me. I can appreciate just how lovely her writing is now that I'm older, and there was a lot of emotional maturity in the writing that made a different (but no less strong) kind of impact on me this time around, now that I'm more aware of what I read.