After the death of her Japanese American mother, sixty-four-year-old Anne Kuroda Duppstadt finds the courage to confront the toxic legacy of her father, a famous artist and cruel narcissist. When a former art professor invites her to his island art studio, she begins pursuing her lifelong dream to become an artist in her own right. But the needs of her family tug at her heart. Her thirty-two-year old daughter s love life is falling apart, and Annie s husband, facing retirement, struggles with depression, leading her to conclude, There is a glass ceiling for women...and it s made out of the people we love.
The Love Ceiling draws readers into the soul of a universal theme for women: the pull between family and creative self-expression. It is the story of a daughter, a wife, a mother and grandmother, and a journey into creativity.
The Love Ceiling is wonderful, touching, funny. Jean Davies Okimoto writes with literary perfect pitch. --Christiane Northrup, MD, Author of and host of PBS television special Mother-Daughter Wisdom
The Love Ceiling is a lovely book, full of wisdom and compassion. With keen insight, the author examines the problems of achieving fulfillment as both a woman and an artist in modern society, as viewed through the eyes of recognizably true-to-life characters. --Barbara G. Walker, Author of The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, and The Crone
In this courageous journey, Okimoto gives us a model for any woman yearning to claim her truth, to be seen for who she is in her deepest heart. I was inspired by The Love Ceiling and recommend it for any woman seeking greater self-expression. --Lisa Dale Norton, Author of Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills
The Love Ceiling, by Jean Davies Okimoto, is a fine painting of words by a true artist. She describes, in beautiful painterly scenes, three generations of one family s women. These capable, strong, creative women go about their lives interacting with family, lovers, and friends. Love with pain, cruelty, anger, hate, anguish, and compassion color their lives. This is a book so compelling that once you begin you cannot put it down. --Chizuko Judy Sugita de Queiroz, Artist and author of Camp Days: 1942-1945
Review
The Love Ceiling is wonderful, touching, funny. Jean Davies Okimoto writes with literary perfect pitch.
Jean Davies Okimoto's latest book, The Love Ceiling, was a winner of a 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award. She is also the recipient of the American Library Association "Best Books for Young Adults" Award, the International Reading Association's Reader's Choice Award, the IRA/CBC Young Adults' Choice Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Washington Governor's Award, the 1993 Maxwell Medallion for Best Children's Book of the Year, and two of her books have been recognized as Smithsonian Notable Books. In 2007 she received the Green Earth Book Award from the Newton Marasco Foundation and in 2008 the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature honor book, a national award given by the Santa Monica Public Library.
Her publishers include Atlantic Monthly Press, Putnam, Little, Brown & Co., Dell, Scholastic, HarperCollins, and the Simul Press in Japan which has published Japanese editions of her novels My Mother Is Not Married To My Father and It's Just Too Much. Her short stories have also appeared in four Delacourte anthologies, Short Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults. Shelley Duvall produced an animated version of Blumpoe the Grumpoe Meets Arnold the Cat for the series "Bedtime Stories" which was narrated by John Candy and appeared on HBO and Showtime. In connection with her non-fiction title, Boomerang Kids: How to Live with Adult Children who Return Home, she has appeared on the Today Show, the CBS Morning Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and CNN.
Her one-act play, Hum it Again, Jeremy has been produced in schools in Vancouver, Toronto and New York. The Northwest Asian American Theater in Seattle produced the world premiere of Uncle Hideki based on her novel Talent Night and in 2006 produced Uncle Hideki and the Empty Nest. Book-it Repertory Theatre produced The Eclipse of Moonbeam Dawson based on her novel by the same name.
Her other titles include Norman Schnurman, Average Person, a mystery, Who Did It, Jenny Lake?, Jason's Women, Molly By Any Other Name, and Take A Chance, Gramps! which was a Junior Library Guild selection, named to the Lone Star State Reading List, and nominated for the Mark Twain Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.
A Place For Grace, published by Sasquatch Books, was the first picture book for a general audience to feature a hearing dog and a deaf character and was praised by Smithsonian as "One of this year's most charming and large-hearted offerings." No Dear, Not Here a picture book about the marbled murrelets, endangered seabirds and their quest for a nest in the Pacific Northwest, is also a Sasquatch title and was designated a 1995 Smithsonian Notable Book for Children.
A member of PEN American Center, the Author's Guild and the Dramatists Guild, she has a master's degree in psychology from Antioch University and is the founder of the Seattle Reading Awards, which recognizes the fifth grade students in the Seattle Public Schools who have shown the most improvement in reading. The program focuses on Chapter One, Bilingual and Special Education students and she has served as its co-chair since the awards began under the sponsorship of the Seattle Reading Association in 1986.
She and her husband Joe live on Vashon Island, Washington. Together they have four grown children, six grandchildren and a dog who thinks it's a person.
It has been years since I picked up a novel that I couldn't put down. But The Love Ceiling's exquisitely portrayed characters quickly became friends and family, compelling me to keep on through the light and shadow of joy and tension, tragedy and victory. Okimoto's profoundly empathic narrative reflects the rich insights of a lifetime sensitively observing the feminine experience. She conveys the truths of inner and interpersonal dynamics with startling clarity as she skillfully alternates first and third person narratives. I repeatedly stumbled across myself: "And I knew also that if I didn't get going on it, I'd put it off. It would be something I'd do tomorrow and the tomorrows would pile up like old newspapers, with self-doubt once again the victor." Reading this book as a 60-something woman, The Love Ceiling is a particularly special gift, rare in tackling the complexities of the "sandwich" generation's responsibilities and relationships to aging, ill and dying parents, to evolving spouse, maturing children and grandchildren, and to ones own past, present and future self. Recognizing that this novel has layers of truths, I read it a second time. As the "heroine" is empowered, so is the reader, aided in teasing apart impediments and seeing opportunities, and nudged to embrace the day.
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This is a beautifully crafted novel that both eloquently and humorously addresses the issues facing women of different generations. Okimoto has mastered the difficult task of combining well developed characters, believable and interesting plot and subplots, and an introspective probe of the joys and challenges women face in defining their identities. I couldn't put it down!
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I loved this book! It made me laugh and cry and I couldn't put it down. There aren't enough books like this out there for my generation(I'm 45) and older. It addresses the unique challenges women face trying to balance love for family and a need for a separate identity. I enjoyed the way the author switched between the voices of the mother and her 32year old daughter. Getting their different perspectives on the same events was fascinating. It would make a terrific mother's day gift, or a gift for Moms anytime of year.
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