Sansei and Sensibility

Stories

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

Narrated by: Cindy Kay

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance - familial, cultural, emotional, artistic - really means. In a California of the '60s and '70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of LA, bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with humor.

©2020 Karen Tei Yamashita (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

True Victory is Victory Over Oneself --M Ueshiba

Sansei and Sensibility by Karen Tei Yamashita is an entertaining collection of short stories that contains flashes of brilliance. While I wasn't really disappointed by it, the quality of the writing is uneven. The Jane Austen inspired stories are in the second half of the book, which I did not expect. What I most appreciated was the way that the author encapsulated and expressed the Sansei experience, particularly in Southern California. I could relate directly to much of the material and I felt validated and supported by it. The narration performance by Cindy Kay is very strong. Ms. Kay can express many characters by making subtle changes in her voice. She is particularly gifted in presenting the male characters in a way that is believable and distinct. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to better understand the Japanese American experience and to devoted fans of Jane Austen.