This is a literary memoir grafted upon botanical themes of growth, seeding, seasons of harvest. Kyo begins with a desire to understand her complicated parents’ history and her mixed race identity. (Kyo is part Japanese, part white, and wholly British.) Kyo struggles with a reticent parent and the death of another.
As a result of a DNA test and through a careful pruning away of her parents’ past and the debris of their romance, Kyo uncovers an even more complicated undergrowth of family and connections. Their memoir throws into question the meanings of belonging, the bonds of love and how far those far are biological.
In some chapters Kyo refers to a woman whom her mother was friends with — perhaps Yoko Ono, though Kyo does not state this outright — and with whom they shared the connection of a child. The focal point here is not celebrity, but the degree to which an individual is a mother or a child to another.
The memoir also addresses the question of normativity and the ways in which women — especially Asian women — are captured and categorized in a Euro-White-centric society.
Maclear writes like a poet. The memoir reads like a poem, a long and winding one. It is lyrical in its delivery as well as in its perspective; the vines of connection are sinuous and undulating and tangled.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 