Block Seventeen

Akiko "Jane" Thompson, a woman in her mid-thirties who is half Japanese and half white, is trying to build a quietly happy life in the Bay Area with her fiancé, Shiro. A bizarre car accident starts to undo that calm. Soon an intruder ransacks their apartment but takes nothing, leaving only cryptic signs that someone was there.

Shiro is fixated on government surveillance. He puts their security at risk with a plan to expose wrongdoing by his employer, the TSA. Meanwhile Jane's mother seems to have vanished, and she now exists only online. Jane would rather ignore these unsettling events, but a cry from the past destroys her peace and forces her to dig into a long-buried family trauma.

As she searches for her mother, Jane confronts her family's painful history in America. She learns how the incarceration of Japanese Americans broke her family apart, and how persecution and fear can push a person to desperate acts.

Guthrie's prose is melodic and suspenseful, moving between the past and an unreliable present and heading toward a shocking revelation. The tone shifts from playful and light to disturbing and disorienting. The novel explores how fear of the "other" continues to shape our minds and distort our world.