Southland (Paperback)

by Nina Revoyr (Author)
Key Phrases: nina revoyr, Frank Sakai, Little Tokyo, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Revoyr (The Necessary Hunger) returns to the gritty, central Los Angeles of her debut with this compelling if overlong tale of a headstrong Japanese-American lesbian law student obsessed with discovering her family history and solving a murder mystery. Jackie Ishida, 25, is undone by the sudden death in 1994 of her loving, seemingly healthy Japanese grandfather, Frank Sakai. A veteran of World War II, he lived a philanthropic life and in the 1960s owned a small grocery in the racially integrated Crenshaw district he grew up in. When Jackie's aunt Lois finds a large shoebox with $38,000 in cash in Frank's closet, both women are perplexed, particularly since they also discover a mysterious beneficiary, Curtis Martindale, in a decades-old will. Lois dispatches Jackie to find Curtis. Enter strong, street-smart James Lanier, a cousin of Curtis's, who informs Jackie that Curtis is dead. An employee at Frank's store during the Watts riots in 1965, Curtis, along with three other black teenage boys, was found frozen to death in the store's freezer. This heinous crime was never reported (nor discussed within the Sakai family) and though white beat cop Nick Lawson was pegged as a prime suspect, the case was never solved and Frank closed the store permanently. As Jackie and James dig deeper into Curtis's past, their friendship (and awkward attraction to each other) takes its toll on Jackie's fading three-year relationship with girlfriend Laura. In chapters alternating past and present, clues are uncovered that romantically link Curtis's mother Alma to Frank. When a surprise suspect in the killings is fingered, it paves the way for a dark conclusion rooted in skepticism, injustice and racial intolerance. Somewhat overplotted but never lacking in vivid detail and authentic atmosphere, the novel cements Revoyr's reputation as one of the freshest young chroniclers of life in L.A.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Spanning three generations, Revoyr's follow-up to The Necessary Hunger (1997) uses the murder of three boys during the 1965 Watts riot as the pivot point for a moving, sometimes harrowing exploration of race relations among black, Japanese, and white residents of L.A. When her grandfather dies in 1994, young Japanese American lawyer Jackie Ishida seeks to discover why her grandfather, Frank, had once planned to leave his Crenshaw grocery store to one of the murder victims, a black teen from the neighborhood. After enlisting the help of one of the young man's relatives, rock-solid community group worker James Lanier, Jackie embarks on a journey that will enable her to understand why she has fled so far from her Japanese roots she won't even consider dating a fellow Asian. Switching effortlessly from the mid-1990s to the 1960s, the 1940s, and back again, Revoyr peoples the landscape with compelling characters who are equally believable whether they're black, Japanese, male, female, gay, or straight. With prose that is beautiful, precise, but never pretentious, she brings to vivid life a painful, seldom-explored part of L.A.'s past that should not be forgotten. If Oprah still had her book club, this novel likely would be at the top of her selection list. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Akashic Books (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888451416
• ISBN-13: 978-1888451412
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #305,550 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Contemporary LA, June 21, 2003

By	saliero (NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

I started reading this the day after I visited the Watts Towers in south central LA. As a rather nervous visitor to the area (not without reason - there was a drive by killing of an 11 year old outside a church the same day) I was absolutely glued to this book.

I love the LA noir genre of detective fiction. This is very different, and offers far more insight into WHY LA is as it is. It takes us to other parts of LA - the more middleclass areas of West LA (where I was staying), for example.

This book is a riveting story, and it deftly juggles the historical context and so achieves so much 'explanation' and 'history' in a naturalistic way.

It also, most importantly of all, offers hope (which, by contrast, noir fiction rarely does)

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It ended far too soon..., May 11, 2003

By	lanewburn "lanewburn" (Portsmouth, VA United States) - See all my reviews

Revoyr's Southland was one of those books that as soon as your eyes absorbed the final sentence, you felt a particular sorrow and a small shred of guilt for being voracious in your reading. For the time spent between it's covers, the reader is locked in the roller coaster ride of it's characters - the ebb and flow of emotions, the tiring yet exhilirating journey of self discovery and awareness of family. Racial tensions, family secrets, the sheer horror that could be trapped within the human soul - all made for the backdrop of this novel, and all manage to draw the reader further into the juxtaposition of Los Angeles in the sixties and early nineties. Each central figure becomes real and vivid, breathing and weaving his or her own story of sorrow and triumph, love and hardship. Each is familiar, and therefore the reader follows the untangling of the central intrigue of Southland with intense interest and concern. The L.A. painted within it's pages is painfully reproduced, harsh and yet with promises struggling to come to fruition. In sum total, at it's end, Southland emerges a beautiful story heralding the lives of it's beautiful and none-too-fictitious people.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful read, December 26, 2006

By	George Polley (Sapporo, Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My wife found a reference to this novel in one of her Japanese language newspapers and suggested that I buy and read it. Am I ever happy that I did! Nina Revoyr has written a wonderful, gripping novel about some very tough times in our country, and has done so with understanding, compassion and feeling. Readers who lived through the era following World War Two will recall the ugly racial tensions of the era with all its denial, and the firestorms that erupted in Watts and other places as a result. Those who didn't live through it will get a harsh dose of reality as the protagonist searches for the killer of four black young men during the Watts riots, and the unexpected outcome as she discovers who the killer was.

I like Nina Revoyr's writing, I do not at all understand those who brush it off with comments like "trite," "mediocre" and "unrealistic." Having lived through that particular period in our history, I found the book very realistic. I hope Nina Revoyr keeps writing so that I can enjoy more of what she does. I couldn't put this book down.

George Polley
Seattle