Review
From the book jacket: Glittering. That's how Katie Takeshima's sister,
Lynn, makes everything seem. The sky is
kira-kira because its color is
deep but see-through at the same time. The sea is
kira-kira for the same
reason. And so are people's eyes. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese
community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it's Lynn who explains to her
why people stop them on the street to stare. And it's Lynn who, with her special
way of viewing the world, teaches Katie to look beyond tomorrow. But when Lynn
becomes desperately ill, and the whole family begins to fall apart, it is up to
Katie to find a way to remind them all that there is always something glittering
--
kira-kira -- in the future.
Luminous in its persistence of love and hope,
Kira-Kira is Cynthia
Kadohata's stunning debut in...
Beyond the Book
Cynthia Kadohata was born in Chicago in 1956. When she was very young her family
moved to Georgia where her father found a job as a chicken sexer, like Katie's
father in
Kira-Kira. Then when she was about two, her father found
a chicken-sexing job in Arkansas, where they lived until she was almost nine.
She has a BA in journalism from the University of Southern California and has
been writing since 1982. When she was 25 and completely directionless, she
took a Greyhound bus trip up the West Coast, and then down through the South and
Southwest. She met people she never would have met otherwise. It was during that
bus trip, which lasted a month, that she rediscovered in the landscape the magic
she'd known as a child. Though she had...
