ABOVE THE EAST CHINA SEA

Four narrators tell the interwoven stories of two teenagers--one American and one Okinawan--in clear voices with few accents. In a plot that is both supernatural and historical, Tamiko Kokuba becomes a medical worker on Okinawa in 1945, and Luz James, an American Army brat, searches for information about her Japanese grandmother in the present. Japanese words are subtly inflected and interspersed with unaccented English. Told from the teenagers' perspectives, the story unfolds slowly as it shifts between past and present. As both girls search for the ghosts of dead relatives, the male characters of each culture are performed gruffly. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2015]