Supersonic A novel

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. Agent: Jennie Dunham, Dunham Literary. (Feb.)

Three generations of Seattle women navigate bigotry, politics, and scheming men. Kohnstamm's second novel opens with a setup that at first seems too thin to carry even a short story: In 2014, Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth has volunteered to run her children's elementary school PTA in hopes of renaming the school after her grandmother, Masako Hasegawa, a victim of Japanese American internment and a longtime music teacher there. But that small effort turns out to unlock a host of complications. It evokes the history of the school's original namesake, an East Coast settler who scammed the native tribes in the 1850s. It implicates an effort by another local, Bruce Jorgensen, to convert a nearby property into a pot dispensary--if only he can game the license-lottery system in his favor. It harks back to Sami's mother, Ruth Hasegawa, who endured Masako's strict upbringing in the 1970s even while pursuing a romance with Larry Dugdale, a ne'er-do-well who's pinned his future on a local aerospace company's plan to manufacture a fleet of supersonic passenger jets. And naturally, it goes all the way back to Masako herself, a passionate music teacher. Bouncing from the middle of the 19th century to the present day, Kohnstamm capably occupies the dynamic of characters in multiple eras while spotlighting commonalities--most prominently the complex (sometimes bigoted) bureaucracies of the city, and the stumblebum manner of men and get-rich-quick ideas. But Kohnstamm seems to be shooting for an epic scope that the novel never quite achieves, as it's generally stuck in the middle gear of chronicling sputtering relationships. That means some late-breaking dramas involving marriage, mental illness, and an attempted plane hijacking feel less persuasive. As a series of individual domestic dramas, it has liveliness and ironic humor. But its parts are less than its whole. A family saga whose execution doesn't quite match its ambition. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.