Shard of Glass

Shard of Glass

By

4.3333333333333
(3 Reviews)
Shard of Glass by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Published:

2005

Downloads:

874

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Shard of Glass

By

4.3333333333333
(3 Reviews)

Book Excerpt

apped my hand away. The look she gave me made me want to melt into the seat. It was hard to always remember who we were and what we were hiding from.

My mother and I had mastered some rudimentary Japanese phrases by the time we arrived, although we soon discovered that most of the locals were too busy staring at us to bother wading through our mangled Japanese. Mostly, we got by with hand signals. Once, I remember, young girls walking to the trains after school crowded around my mother, shyly asking if they could touch her hair. Even in that large city, we were anomalies, walking circus exhibits who couldn't even speak properly. My mother felt profoundly uncomfortable there, I think. We left after just a few weeks, traveling by ferry and local train to one of the most remote areas in Japan: the Kerama islands, just to the west of Okinawa's main island. The war had ravaged this place, you could see it in the faces of the women in hitched kimonos who hacked at the sugar cane or in the occasional mortar t

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Looking through the glass shows the past, which might or might not be helpful to you. The story is set in the mid-1960s, and concers a black mother and her daughter running away from the girl\'s white father. Some minor aspects of the story didn\'t ring true (world travel on a housekeeper\'s savings?) and there was no real flavor of any of the places they went (including the States in 1960.)

The daughter is a good character.
5
Interesting well-written magical SF novelette, with mother and daughter on the run, sharing a secret.
Alex Martin - Love and Loss and the Perils of War
FEATURED AUTHOR - 'The Plotting Shed' (see her blog http://www.intheplottingshed.com/) was Alex Martin's first writing space at the bottom of her Welsh garden. Now she splits her time between Wales and France and plot wherever she is. She still wanders aimlessly in the countryside with her dog and her dreams and she can still be found typing away with imaginary friends whispering in her ear, but these days she has the joy of seeing her stories published and the treasured feedback from readers who've enjoyed them.