Heart Mountain
A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A "dazzling first novel" about Japanese Americans and their Wyoming neighbors in the era of WWII internment camps (Chicago Tribune).
A renowned chronicler of life in the West, Gretel Ehrlich turns her talents to a moment in history when American citizens were set against each other, offering "a novel full of immense poetic feeling for the internal lives of its varied characters and the sublime high plains landscape that is its backdrop" (The New York Times Book Review).
This is the story of Kai, a graduate student reunited with his old-fashioned parents in the most painful way possible; Mariko, a gifted artist; Mariko's husband, a political dissident; and her aging grandfather, a Noh mask carver from Kyoto. It is also the story of McKay, who runs his family farm outside the nearby town; Pinkey, an alcoholic cowboy; and Madeleine, whose soldier husband is missing in the Pacific. Most of all, Heart Mountain is about what happens when these two groups collide. Politics, loyalty, history, love—soon the bedrocks of society will seem as transient and fleeting as life itself.
Set at the real-life Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, this powerful novel paints "a sweeping, yet finely shaded portrait of a real West unfolding in historical time" (The Christian Science Monitor).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This first novel by poet and essayist Ehrlich ( The Solace of Open Spaces earned comparison with Whitman and Thoreau) builds its story around the WW II internment of some 100,000 Japanese-Americans. Not far from an actual relocation camp on Heart Mountain in Wyoming, the author sets her invented town of Luster. McKay, unable to go to war with his brothers because of his lame leg, stays home to raise livestock. He resumes an affair with Madeleine, now the wife of a POW, but soon falls deeply in love with Mariko, a beautiful Nisei painter whom he visits in the guarded camp. Kai, a young Nisei historian, reports camps events from his point of view. Vignettes of Luster's local eccentrics contrast with those of sensitive Japanese artists and intellectuals whose lives are destroyed. Rich accounts of calving, cock-fighting and descriptions of the Western locale show the author at her best, but fail to advance the narrative. Ehrlich's assiduous research is evident, yet worthy as is her desire to expose the injuries dealt to innocent citizens in a time of national panic, her characters are often only wafer-thin. The novel succeeds less as a full-blooded work of fiction than as a compassionate documentary. 25,000 first printing; BOMC and QPBC alternates; author tour.
