Review by Booklist Review
ldquo;The first property of thirst is an element of surprise." Wiggins names ten more unexpected and evocative properties over the course of this grand novel of principled and creative individuals caught in the vise of history. Twins Cas and Rocky Rhodes fled their ill-gotten world of privilege. Cas became an innovative, internationally renowned harpist. A disciple of Thoreau and Emerson, Rocky settled in Owens Valley, California, establishing the Three Chairs Ranch, pursing endless battles over water rights, marrying a French immigrant doctor and accomplished cook, and having twins, Sunny and Stryker. When their mother dies, Cas gives up her cosmopolitan life to help Rocky raise them. Sunny grows up to run a restaurant in tiny Lone Pine that draws the Hollywood crowd. Mischief incarnate, Stryker flees trouble by enlisting and lands in Pearl Harbor. Schiff, a smart, caring Jewish lawyer from Chicago working for the Department of the Interior, is sent to Owens Valley, appalled by his assignment to establish a Japanese American internment camp. Virtuoso Wiggins' ninth novel is an expansive, gloriously symphonic, intricately patterned (if at times exceedingly detailed) tale of racism, civil disobedience, nature's glory, art's radiance, and the imperative to save what you love. Loss, desire, moral dilemmas, reflection, and zesty dialogue with the do-good energy of Frank Capra films generate a WWII home front tale of profound and far-ranging inquiry and imagination, scintillating humor, intrepid romance, and conscience.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize finalist Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen) returns with a powerful epic set on a Southern California ranch during WWII. Rocky Rhodes named the ranch Three Chairs, after Thoreau's idea that three chairs are for "society"--or "company," as Rocky puts it. A widowed scion of a wealthy family back east, he lives there with his daughter, Sunny, and his twin sister. Sunny has a twin brother, Stryker, who is presumed to have died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rocky has spent much of his fortune battling the Los Angeles Water Board, furious that the city has stolen all the local water. Things get worse when Schiff, a young lawyer from the Department of the Interior, is sent to the area to establish an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Morally outraged himself, Schiff befriends the Rhodes family and falls for Sunny, a self-taught cook who takes inspiration from notes left by her mother. Here, Wiggins's wordplay is stellar, as when the properties of a souffle become metaphor for the emotions of those about to eat it: "Sunny folded one thing--the inflated egg whites--into the other, le fond--with the greatest care, aware of both their fragile properties." The dialogue is full of grit, and Wiggins manages to capture a big swath of mid-century America by placing a blue-blooded family into a desert inland complete with adobe haciendas, desert blooms, and Hollywood movie sets, while throughout, the Rhodes hold out hope for Stryker's survival. Wiggins's masterpiece is one for the ages. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Vibrant characters, multiple storylines, and a visceral sense of time and place coalesce in this engrossing novel from Pulitzer finalist Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen). In the early 20th century, Rockwell Rhodes, heir to his father's railroad fortune, travels west to settle in the thriving agricultural community of California's Owens Valley. He builds a home for his wife, Lou, and their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and embraces the Indigenous and Mexican of the region's other inhabitants. But the Rhodeses' idyll is short-lived as Rocky battles the Los Angeles Water Authority, which has been desiccating the farmland by diverting the valley's water; Lou falls ill; and Rocky's sister Cas abandons her musical career to care for her niece and nephew. News of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor arrives the same day as Stryker's letter from Honolulu announcing a surprise marriage and the birth of twin sons. Tensions ratchet up further when Mr. Schiff, a lawyer from the U.S. Interior Department who is ambivalent about his remit in light of his Jewish roots, seeks help from the Rhodes family to enact Roosevelt's controversial order establishing the Manzanar concentration camp that would imprison thousands of Japanese Americans. VERDICT In lush language, Wiggins evokes a keen sense of history and its life altering effects, a righteous frustration with government deception, and faith in the power of love to quench one's deepest thirsts.--Sally Bissell
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sweeping, cinematic story of love and family set against the dramatic backdrop of World War II and the American West. "You can't save what you don't love." That's the first sentence of Wiggins' new novel and a leitmotif throughout the book--a love story, in the classic sense, as well as a love letter to an American West celebrated by Hollywood even as it was sucked dry by the city of Los Angeles. It's also a lesson in how Wiggins' languid, linguistically lush and lyrical novel, set in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, found its way to completion. As the author's daughter, photographer Lara Porzak, relays in an afterword, Wiggins was just a few chapters shy of completing the book when, in 2016, she suffered a massive stroke that affected her sequencing logic and short-term memory. Porzak worked from Wiggins' notes and with a collaborator to help her mother complete the novel, saving it as a true labor of love. Given that painstaking process and the breathtaking beauty of the bulk of this novel, it would be ungrateful to gripe that the end doesn't quite live up to the standard set by the previous chapters. To be sure, Wiggins set an extremely high bar. The book follows the experiences of several memorable characters, including Rockwell "Rocky" Rhodes, the scion of a wealthy East Coast railroad magnate, who has reinvented himself as a hardworking ranch man and impassioned preservationist; a Chicago-raised Jewish attorney named Schiff, who has been sent by the Department of the Interior to set up an internment camp for Japanese Americans in a desiccated former apple orchard adjacent to Rocky's turf in Lone Pine, California; and Sunny, Rocky's spirited daughter, a fiercely talented, mostly self-taught chef with whom Schiff falls in love. Wiggins' interwoven plotlines--propelled here by romantic and there by familial love--and colorful characters are entrancing and as cinematic as the real-life Westerns that were filmed in the valley in which the book is primarily set. But what makes the novel soar is the way Wiggins can evoke landscapes both interior and exterior, especially the expansive valley that has come to exemplify America's best qualities--and its worst. This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
