From Publishers Weekly
The Patty Hearst kidnapping was one of the defining incidents of the 1970s, but almost 30 years later, it has faded into legend, despite the many words written on the subject. Choi (The Foreign Student) makes the first stab at fictionalizing the drama, giving it grainy psychological depth and texture, while cleaving close to the true course of events. Instead of focusing on Patty (here named Pauline, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper publisher), Choi turns her attention on Jenny Shimada, a young Japanese-American woman, who, fleeing the Feds after she and her boyfriend orchestrate the bombing of draft offices to protest the Vietnam War, agrees to help Pauline and her kidnappers. This protagonist is based on a real-life person, Wendy Yoshimura, who spent what's now called "the lost year" (1974, when Patty and her captors disappeared) with Patty and two of her kidnappers. In Choi's book, the four spend the time in a rented farmhouse in New York State, with Jenny running errands while Pauline and her "comrades" undergo physical training for their fight against "the pigs" and halfheartedly write a book. While the unfolding drama-Pauline's transformation, the bank robbery, Pauline and Jenny's cross-country trip-is enthralling, it is Choi's skill at getting inside the heads of her protagonists that gives the novel its particular, unsettling appeal. What makes Jenny a radical? And what then leads her to wonder whether "perhaps they had been wrong to fight Power on its terms, instead of rejecting its terms utterly"? Sounding the depths of her conflicted protagonists, Choi takes an uncompromising look at issues of race, class, war and peace.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Jenny Shimada is consumed with loneliness and guilt over the fact that her lover and partner is serving time for the bombing of a California military recruitment center to protest the Vietnam War. Isolated from her compatriots, adrift in rural New York, Jenny is enlisted to help the latest radical cadre--two surviving members of a group that kidnapped a wealthy heiress and the heiress-turned-radical herself. The three have been spirited out of California in a hapless attempt to save them and get them to write a best-seller chronicling their deeds and their cause. The assignment compels Jenny to examine her own political ideals, the price she has paid for them, her relationship with a lover she no longer loves, and her estrangement from a father who, though radicalized himself during the Japanese internment, disapproves of her politics. Inspired by the Patty Heart kidnapping, Choi captures the radical politics of the 1960s, delving into the isolation of fugitives and what happens when wayward idealism is mixed with volatile personalities and emotions.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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