Exit A

The title refers to the transit stop for an American military base in Japan and symbolizes the mixing of the two cultures as well as the tensions between them. Severin, a high school football player on the base, falls for the commander/coach's half-Japanese daughter, but the fledgling relationship goes awry when she gets involved in a local crime and goes to prison. Years later they meet again. John Slattery ably handles the Asian names and English as spoken by Japanese and, later, Vietnamese characters, as well as the speech cadences of a disturbed college student, kidnap victims, and a dying man used to being in command, among others. The novel's ending may be unrealistic, but you can't fault the performance. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

October 2, 2006
Bestseller Swofford explores teenage love in his uneven first novel, which opens in 1989 at Yokata Air Base outside Tokyo (the title comes from the name of a nearby train stop). Severin Boxx, a 17-year-old military brat, plays football and pines for Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, the half-Japanese daughter of the American base commander, who's also his coach. Virginia's involvement in some not-so-petty crime (her heroine is Faye Dunaway of Bonnie and Clyde
) leads her into serious trouble, which separates the young lovers seemingly forever. Swofford, as one might expect from the author of the acclaimed Jarhead
(2003), his memoir of being a Marine sniper in the first Gulf War, clearly knows the U.S. military culture, though some readers may find his view of it overly harsh. He also does a good job of depicting the strange mélange where Japanese and American cultures coexist, but he's less convincing in his portrayal of Boxx's adult life (and doomed marriage) in San Francisco, while the ending is much too neat to be truly compelling. 7-city author tour.