A Paper Son

November 2, 2015
Buchholz’s gripping debut is a clever supernatural thriller that plays with readers’ narrative expectations. During a massive storm in present-day San Francisco, third-grade teacher Peregrine Long witnesses a vision in his teacup of a Chinese-American family on a ship entering a harbor in China. Unable to explain the experience, he decides to write a short story about the family: in 1925, Bing and Li-Yu leave their home in California with their two children, Rose and Henry, and sail across the Pacific to reunite with their family in a rural Chinese village. Peregrine’s story is published in a small journal, and the very next day, Eva Wong, an elderly Chinese-American woman, arrives at his apartment; his tale exactly retells her family history. Though neither of them understands what’s happening, Eva implores Peregrine to continue writing so she can find out what happened to her uncle, Henry. Peregrine seeks advice from his sister and a fellow teacher while he attempts to understand the mysterious story. As the storm rages on for weeks, Peregrine continues to have visions and compulsively writes what he sees. Water is a recurring theme that ties together the many threads—from the nonstop rain in San Francisco, to pools, rivers, and oceans, to the flooded rice paddies in 1920s rural China. Rich, interesting characters fill this fast-paced, magical realist novel about family connections.

December 1, 2015
The rain will not stop falling on San Francisco. But as the city gets battered by a long-lasting storm, third-grade teacher Peregrine Long faces his own deluge of revelations. The aspiring author begins to write about Li-Yu, the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America who travels in the 1920s to her husband's home in China. She gets stranded there with her children after her husband suddenly dies At first, Peregrine thinks he's creating her story. But after the first installment is published in a literary journal, an older woman shows up on his doorstep demanding to know why he is writing about her family history. That is only the beginning of a series of strange events that envelop Peregrine, his sister, and his girlfriend in this wonderfully imaginative novel. Buchholz constructs a world that is both familiar and strange, where magical events are layered on top of the everyday, the distinction between them not always clear. The mystery of the story, while a powerful driver of the book, becomes almost secondary to the wonder of it all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)