Go: A Novel - Hardcover

Uyemoto, Holly

3.11

19 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052593779X ISBN 13: 9780525937791

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1995

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Facing an identity crisis in the week before her twenty-first birthday, Wil struggles with her Japanese-American family's high ideals and a failed relationship and finds solace in the wisdom of her ancestors. By the author of Rebel Without a Clue. 15,000 first printing. Tour.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Uyemoto's (Rebel Without a Clue) prickly second novel focuses on generational differences among Japanese-Americans. Though therefore driven more by ideas than plot, it features a narrator?a Sensei, or third-generation Japanse-American, from Southern California?who illustrates her reflections with stories about her elders and cousins. Wilhelmina ("Wil"), 20, is recuperating from a nervous collapse brought on by an abortion and a broken love affair. But she's uncomfortable in the role of patient: "For a woman of my culture in another era," she tells a therapist, "what you people diagnose in me as a bi-polar disorder would have been dismissed as weakness of character." Wil's mother, aunts and uncles were taught to suffer stoically, but Wil, a product of demonstrative American culture, gives shockingly violent testimony to her cousin's fatal accident at a pool, her uncle's alcoholic rage and her mother's decision to club a badger to death after trapping it in her garden. Finally, Wil commits a spontaneous act of revenge against her mother, then defines the event as a mix of American "guilt," Japanese "shame" and the signal to start life anew. The narrative is insightful overall, though Uyemoto stumbles in trying to explain Wil's sublimated desire to be a boy, and in using the Japanese game "go" as a symbol of the family's values. This cathartic novel does not chart a typical journey to recovery, but its heroine's storytelling finally does allow her?and, by extension, the reader?to accept her parents' cultural mores.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

As Wil prepares to turn 21, she starts taking stock of her life. Recently released from the hospital after breaking up with her college boyfriend, she still feels depressed, not to mention out of place among the collection of silent and crazy uncles, selfish cousins, compulsive aunts, and oblivious parents that is her family. The thread binding them all seems to be their common experiences as Japanese Americans, especially during World War II incarceration in holding camps. With both sarcasm and sympathy, Wil reexamines the key events in her family's past and present to try to get a feel for her own future. The family misfit seems to be the repository for all the family's emotions, and as she sorts through them, a coherent history emerges, as does Wil's sense of self. Uyemoto has a real love of words, and she fills her second novel with wordplay, puns, and double entendres. Fortunately, the protagonist she has created is the perfect vehicle for her young, confident, and witty voice. Mary Ellen Sullivan

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