The fates of two women—one American, one Japanese—become entwined in this sweeping novel of 19th century Japan on the cusp of radical change and westernization.
The Japanese tea ceremony, steeped in ritual, is at the heart of this story of an American girl, adopted by Kyoto's most important tea master and raised as attendant and surrogate younger sister to his privileged daughter Yukako. Pasts shrouded in secrets and mysterious traditions rocked by modernization make THE TEAHOUSE FIRE a compelling and provocative story, lush in details and epic in scope.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan's cultural traditions are changing. Taking shelter in a teahouse, an American orphan named Aurelia Bernard will witness some of the most profound of those changes. Barbara Caruso offers a signature rendering of this lush historical novel. As ever, her narration is finely nuanced and lapidary. Like a talented watercolorist, she tints the story with accent and characterization, from the exhausted French voice of Aurelia's dying mother to the musical Japanese intonations of Shin Yukako, Aurelia's friend and rival. A tea ceremony is a studied affair, and, accordingly, little moves quickly in this novel. But with Caruso to listen to, who's in a hurry? A.C.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
About the Author
ELLIS AVERY teaches creative writing at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, Kyoto Journal, LIT, and the Pacific Reader, as well as onstage at New York's Expanded Arts Theater. She studied Japanese tea ceremony for five years in New York and Kyoto. She lives in New York City.
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