Supersonic
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“Masterfully rendered and mercilessly readable. Kohnstamm populates these pages with insight, hilarity, emotion, and unforgettable characters. Supersonic is a novel with so much narrative propulsion that it manages to live up to its name.” —Jonathan Evison, author of Small World and Lawn Boy
When PTA president Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth petitions to rename a Seattle elementary school after her late grandmother, she ignites a battle over the school’s future and the history of its surrounding neighborhood. Supersonic launches readers into a kaleidoscopic tale of the generations of interrelated families who breathed life into that small, hilltop community.
The story cuts in time from the arrival of white settlers’ ships to the last indigenous landowner fighting to hold on to scraps of his ancestral home and back to the school’s PTA auction. It interweaves an opioid-addicted nineteenth-century con man–cum–civic booster, a disgraced Navy seaman building an airplane that travels faster than sound, a stay-at-home dad hustling to open the city’s first legal weed shop and Sami’s grandmother, a survivor of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, who founded the school’s once-celebrated music program.
The novel traces their false starts, triumphs, and heartbreaks through the booms and busts of the Yukon gold rush, the jet age, Big Tech, and beyond. By exploring the converging and often clashing personalities that make up the dynamic soul of a place, Supersonic illuminates themes of identity, displacement, destruction, and reinvention that give rise to all great American cities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kohnstamm (Lake City) serves up a splendid, centuries-spanning tale of Indigenous and colonial history in the Pacific Northwest. In 1856, Duwamish chief Si'sia vows to protect sacred land near Seattle from violent white settlers, some of whom are named Stevenson and Stalworth. In 1971, Si'sia's descendant Larry Dugdale works as a machinist on the prototype of a supersonic jet. Larry is in love with Ruth Hasegawa, whose immigrant ancestors once worked, and then owned, Si'sia's land. Ruth's mother, Masako, a Japanese internment camp survivor who established the music program at Stevenson Elementary School, controls Ruth's every move in an ill-fated attempt to arrange a better life for her. Kohnstamm alternates Larry's narrative with that of Ruth's daughter, Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth, who in 2014 spearheads a push to rename the elementary school after her mother, only to be told that the school may have to close. The interconnectedness of the cast creates an addictive narrative tension, and Kohnstamm's character work is top notch, particularly with the tragic Larry, whose earnest and increasingly drastic actions follow one misfortune after another. Readers shouldn't miss Kohnstamm's heartbreaking saga.
