Rahna Reiko Rizzuto / Shadow Child

The Bindery hosts Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (Hiroshima in the Morning and Why She Left Us) for her new novel, Shadow Child. Please join us!

Shadow Child is a gorgeous novel about three strong women, the dangerous ties of family and identity, and the long shadow our histories can cast. Twin sisters Hana and Kei grew up in a tiny Hawaiian town in the 1950s and ‘60s, so close they shared the same nickname. Mixed-race and fatherless, they were raised in dreamlike isolation by their loving yet unstable mother. But when their cherished threesome with Mama is broken, and then further shattered by a violent betrayal that neither young woman can forgive, it seems their bond may be severed forever—until, six years later, Kei arrives on Hana’s lonely New York City doorstep with a secret that will change everything. Flashing back to 1942, readers meet Lillie, a young Japanese woman orphaned as a baby on the steps of a rural church in California. After she falls in love with Donald, the only other Japanese person Lillie has known, the young couple weds and moves in with his parents in Los Angeles, only to find that in that time of war, Japanese Americans were viewed with distrust and hostility. From the internment camps in World War II America, to the exotic beaches and caves of Hawaii, to the bustling metropolis of New York City, Shadow Child follows these extraordinary women as they search for acceptance, family, and a truer sense of identity and happiness than what they’d known.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of the memoir Hiroshima in the Morning, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle. Her debut novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award. The first woman to graduate from Columbia College with a BA in Astrophysics, she was raised in Hawaii and lives in Brooklyn.