Thought Train to Pusan

I’ve been having a hard time sitting down to write this review because, well, I just don’t know. Listening to this audio book left me feeling like there was so much there, and also not enough. And I am torn, and really am not sure how I feel about it at the end of the day.  Block Seventeen by Kimiko Guthrie is told mainly from the perspective of Akiko (who goes by Jane), a half-Japanese, half-white woman living in San Francisco during the recession. Out of work and sewing dresses from home for a little income, lives with her fiance, Shiro, who works as a TSA agent and wants to expose the racist behaviors of his employers. As Shiro gets further caught up in his conspiracies and plans, Jane tries more and more to keep the peace, all while also desperately trying to get in physical contact with her mother, who seems to have disappeared from the physical realm only to be found online. In a series of escalating events in her apartment, Jane is confronted with a long-buried secret of he...

This novel ended up on my to-read list last year after it was a Cannonball featured review. I can definitely understand why so many have spoken so highly of it, and am sure this won’t be the last we hear of Tommy Orange in the years to come.  While presented as one complete novel of converging stories, There There reads almost like a collection of short stories, with different threads connecting each of the characters: that is, until everything comes to a head at the end of the story. Starting with a historical essay from Orange explaining “brief and jarring vignettes revealing the violence and genocide that Indigenous people have endured, and how it has been sanitized over the centuries,” we are presented with context and generational history of the lives of the characters we are about to meet; although fictional, it draws from reality. The novel then invites the reader to experience little snippets of the lives of 12 different Native Americans living in the Oakland area, and all ...