American Woman

From AwardAnnals

Book:	American Woman
Author:	Susan Choi
Honors:	2004 Pulitzer–fiction finalist Score: 6.54
Genres:	Fiction books Action/Adventure books
Publisher:	HarperCollins

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, was published to remarkable critical acclaim. The New Yorker called it “an auspicious debut,” and the Los Angeles Times touted it as “a novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness,” naming it one of the ten best books of the year. American Woman, this gifted writer’s second book, is a novel of even greater scope and dramatic complexity, about a young Japanese-American radical caught in the militant underground of the mid-1970s.

When 25-year-old Jenny Shimada steps out of the Rhinecliff train station in New York’s Hudson Valley, the last person she expects to see is Rob Frazer, a shadowy figure from her previous life. On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, Jenny agrees to take on the job of caring for three younger fugitives whom Frazer has spirited out of California. One of them, the granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity. Kidnapped by a homegrown revolutionary group, Pauline shocked America when she embraced her captors’ ideology, denouncing family and class to enlist in their radical cell.

American Woman unfolds the story of Jenny and her charges—Pauline, Juan, and Yvonne, the remains of the busted revolutionary cadre—as they pursue their destinies from an old farmhouse in upstate New York back to California. Provocative, suspenseful, and often wickedly comic, the novel explores the psychology of the young radicals—outsiders all—as isolation and paranoia inevitably undermine their ideals. American Woman is a tour de force with chilling resonance for readers today.

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