Block Seventeen

“After a freak car accident, Akiko “Jane” Thompson’s quiet life begins to unravel. Her mother appears to have disappeared, an intruder breaks into her apartment only to reorganize her belongings, and her fianceé conspires against his employer, the TSA. As Jane tries to make sense of these happenings, she confronts her family’s tragic past and learns how the trauma they endured at the Japanese internment camps has lingered from generation to generation.

At first glance, Block Seventeen appears to be a thriller intertwined with a generational story. But as we delve deeper into Jane’s tale, Guthrie starts to play with elements of surrealism, ghost stories, and psychology, all of which work well on a structural level. But as Jane’s psyche becomes more and more distraught, as a reader, I felt distanced from her. Pieces of her story that were once so poignant – her relationship with her mother, her introspection about identity, and conflicts with her fianceé – became muddled in the bizarre and it is much harder to connect with Jane as our narrator. Overall, it was enjoyable to read, mostly because of the nice prose and realistic dialogue, but I felt disappointed by Jane and the choices she made.”