RaveShelf AwarenessEquipped with a startling ability to draw graceful fiction from grotesque history, Dolen Perkins-Valdez brings her talents to the 1970s ... Perkins-Valdez ushers in this central conflict slowly and methodically; when it arrives, the revelations that follow are unforgettable ... Readers will find it impossible to take in even a chapter without their gut twisting in recognition; the ghosts of these horrors are still alive today.
Kat Chow
RaveShelf Awareness... magnificent ... In carefully arranged pieces, anecdotes laid together like mosaic tiles, Chow unleashes the power of her own grief after the loss of her mother ... Chow excavates her own history with ruthless honesty and deep respect ... It would be easy to characterize Chow\'s book as yet another grief memoir, another tale of how to wade through the years of loneliness and struggle after the loss of a parent. That would be selling the story short, not to mention failing to grasp its scope. Seeing Ghosts is about Florence, yes, but also about everything Florence\'s family means--a patchwork quilt of Chinese Americans making sense of the amorphous American Dream. Chow does this most skillfully in scenes with her father, a man who struggles with happiness, whatever that means, yet seems desperately to want ... Chow\'s memoir is not an easy book, which doesn\'t mean it\'s not an easy read. The prose is tight and lovely, one page and one fragment intertwining with the next. The experience of reading it is enjoyable, despite the subject matter. But that is where Chow\'s journalistic skill triumphs: she feeds readers an impossibly challenging topic through beautifully seasoned bites. The result is that readers turn the last page having swallowed a delicious meal, only to realize there is so much more for them to digest. Seeing Ghosts is a book that will leave readers thinking, mourning, probing the absences and injustices of American life, equally haunted and soothed by ghosts
