THE TURTLE HOUSE

A multigenerational family saga set in World War II Japan and contemporary rural Texas.

Churchill’s debut unfolds in parallel the stories of an immigrant Japanese woman and her American granddaughter. Mineko’s story begins in Kadoma, a district of Osaka, in the summer of 1936, when the little girl discovers a beautiful abandoned estate on a hill, its entrance presided over by a stone turtle, with a pond full of live turtles out back. Over the years, this becomes her special place, a refuge for the athletic, bright young woman who’s gotten none of the beauty her mother and sister share. When she meets an upper-class boy named Akio, it’s at this “turtle house” where she teaches him to swim, and where they fall in love, though his future holds an arranged marriage and, even more threatening, the wartime draft. In parallel chapters set in Curtain, Texas, in 1999, we see Mineko as “Grandminnie,” relating her stories into a tape recorder for her 25-year-old granddaughter, Lia, who’s back home after abruptly quitting her first job out of architecture school under mysterious circumstances. The two are sharing a bedroom at Lia’s parents’ house, since Grandminnie’s own home has burned to the ground, also under mysterious circumstances. Based on the life of the author’s grandmother, Mineko’s story illuminates an impressively wrought series of settings, from prewar provincial Japan, to wartime housing on a U.S. Army base, to small-town postwar America. Meanwhile, Lia’s story takes us to architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin. In each of these places, Churchill highlights the challenges faced by girls and women, from oppressive cultural norms to domestic violence and sexual harassment. She deftly manages a very large cast of characters and a complicated plot.

This lovingly illuminated double portrait asks us to think about what has changed and what has not, and at what cost.