Touching finish offsets rough start
Mika Suzuki is a directionless, 35-year-old Japanese woman with a big secret: She gave her daughter up for adoption at 19.
Emiko Jean’s “Mika in Real Life” takes place as Mika takes on a major transformation, starting with reconnecting with her daughter, Penny. Eventually, Mika has to confront the events that led her to being a single, constantly laid-off disappointment to her mother and figure out how to have a relationship with her own child whom she hasn’t spoken to since the day Penny was born.
In an effort to not look like such a loser, Mika begins weaving a tapestry of lies to create the life of Mika 2.0 — who she wants to be and maybe could have been. Mika gives her life an undeserved glow-up that will certainly blow up in her face. It’s hard to enjoy when things are going right for Mika because you know all the sugar glass will splinter into shards sooner or later.
Fortunately, that train wreck only takes about a third of the book before moving on to greener pastures. The novel picks up when Jean reveals Mika in real life — not just a Mika that’s honest, but one that is a better, rounder character. She’s more believable.
When Mika decides to be honest with herself and others, she begins to process her life. “Mika in Real Life” explores universal issues, like finding happiness and the challenges of being a parent, as well as nuanced ones, like the Suzuki family’s particular strains of trauma: her mother being uprooted to a foreign land, Mika’s own experiences that led to her being pregnant and giving up art, and Penny’s pursuit of identity as a Japanese American raised by white parents in Ohio.
The Mika of the second half of the book makes
for far more pleasant company. She isn’t perfect, but has a semblance of balance in her life and strives to be someone and do something.
For the first bit, “Mika in Real Life” relies on its interesting premise to drag readers through flat predictability and buckshot-style writing. But it’s worth wading through the rough start to get the novel’s redemptive, touching ending. — Donna Edwards, Associated Press
Four veteran Chicago police detectives
are known as The Fantastic Four for their long history of spectacular gang busts. So when one of them, Leo Hammond, is shot dead in his bed with his own gun, it’s a big case.
At the start of Joanna Schaffhausen’s “Long Gone,” the second novel in her series featuring Annalisa Vega, the young detective is working the scene when Hammond’s three surviving partners show up, demand to take over of the case and are promptly rebuffed. Like many members of the Chicago PD, they don’t trust Vega — not since she busted her own father, a retired member of the department, for covering up a long-ago murder by another family member.
The three also need Vega to arrest the obvious suspect and wrap the case up quickly because she’s very good at her job. If the investigation drags on, she might eventually uncover dark secrets they’ve kept under wraps for years.
The obvious suspect is Hammond’s much younger second wife, who stands to collect on his million-dollar life insurance policy. However, she is far from the only suspect. There’s Hammond’s first wife, who despises him, to say nothing of the hundreds of criminals he encountered over a long career. Prominent among them are David Edwards, recently released after serving time for killing a waitress, and Moe Bocks, who Leo had been harassing since failing to prove the guy strangled his girlfriend more than two decades ago.
The result is a fastpaced, multifaceted series of investigations that make Vega a growing threat to the surviving Fantastic Three. Schaffhausen skillfully unwinds her twist-filled plot to a slambang conclusion. As with her previous novels, her complex characters are well developed, and her prose is first rate.