Harmless Like You, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Harmless Like You, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
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Harmless Like You
A Novel

Author: Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller, P.J. Ochlan

Unabridged: 10 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/28/2017

Categories: Fiction, Coming Of Age


Synopsis

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Berlin, and Connecticut, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki's son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront the mother who abandoned him when he was only two years old.

The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki’s life is unmoored.

Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds, which asks—and ultimately answers—how does a mother desert her son?

About Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan received a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellowship.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sandra

In 1968, Yuki is 16 years old and she lives on the edge of the Village in NY. At school she has no friends and feels she does not fit in. Mathematics is a struggle and her Saturday Japanese classes are even more of a struggle. Art is the only class she looks forward to. One day she meets Odile at sc......more

Goodreads review by Blair

(Review originally published on my blog, August 2016) In 60s/70s Manhattan, Yukiko Oyama is a lonely girl, caught between two cultures; she feels ugly, and her peers either bully or ignore her. Opting to stay in New York rather than move back to Japan with her parents, she falls into an unequal frien......more