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Silk Road

A Bride’s Story, Vols. 2-3

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Around the age of ten, I had a brief but intense love affair with historical fiction. It began with Little House in the Big Woods — required reading for all American girls of a certain age — and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I then discovered Johnny Tremain, made an unsuccessful attempt to read The Last of the Mohicans — way over my head, I’m afraid — and devoured Summer of My German Soldier.

The books that had the greatest claim on my heart, however, were Lois Lenski’s American regional novels: Strawberry Girl, Cotton in My Sack, Blue Ridge Billy, Mama Hattie’s Girl, and Shoo-Fly Girl. Looking back on these books now, I can see that they weren’t as meticulously crafted as Roll of Thunder or Johnny Tremain; Lenski’s writing was, at times, pedestrian, and her characterizations thin. What Lenski did well, however, was help young readers imagine what it was like to live in rural areas before television, telephones, and electricity were fixtures of the American home. Her books were filled with vivid descriptions of everyday activities: baking pies, picking crops, making dresses from patterns, canning vegetables, feeding chickens, washing clothes. From my sheltered point of view, Lenski’s characters led exotic, fascinating lives: who wouldn’t want to turn a bolt of calico into an actual dress, or spend the day picking berries? (The answer turns out to be me, as I flunked Home Economics.)

Though I’ve read my share of historical novels in the intervening years, I’ve seldom loved those books with the same fierce intensity as I did Strawberry Girl. Some of that disenchantment could be chalked up to adolescence: as a teenager, music superseded books as my most important form of escapism, and I read far fewer novels. And some of my disenchantment reflected my academic training: as a college student, I majored in History, taking courses that gave me the tools for exploring other places and times. Reading A Bride’s Story, however, reminded me how powerful good historical fiction can be.

A Bride’s Story depicts everyday life in a long-ago setting — in this case, Central Asia in the nineteenth century, where the fictional Eihon clan herd sheep and make textiles. To give readers a better understanding of the period, Kaoru Mori devotes entire chapters to describing how her characters live. In chapter 6 of A Bride’s Story, for example, Mori documents “oven day,” a communal event in which women prepare and bake bread. Mori captures the scene in meticulous detail, showing us how the women shape and stamp the dough into elaborate patterns. At the same time, however, Mori uses this gathering to explore the social dynamic within the Eihon clan; though none of the women are overtly hostile to new bride Amir, her inexperience and outsider status make it all but impossible for her to join the circle.

Other rituals are depicted with similar care. In chapter 10, for example, British anthropologist Henry Smith observes the Eihon women embroidering linen. Smith is a clever device: he serves as a natural reader surrogate, neatly anticipating the reader’s questions about the materials and cultural significance of the patterns. His questions serve another equally important purpose: they prompt Balkirsch, the clan matriarch, to identify the author of each design, explaining who she was and where she came from, in the process giving an informal history of the village.

Even in volume three, which introduces a new romantic subplot, Mori continues to document everyday activities in painstaking detail. Once again, Henry Smith serves as our eyes and ears, this time during a brief stay with two women he meets on the road to Ankara. Mori does a superb job of contrasting these women’s existence with the Eihons’: unlike the Eihons, who live in a thriving village, these women live alone on the edge of a vast plain, occupying two modest yurts with little in the way of possessions. Talas, the younger woman, must do the work of two people, grinding grain by hand, spinning wool, preparing meals, and tending a flock of sheep, following them on foot for miles each day. Though her face is youthful, her body language is not; in stark contrast to the physically robust Amir, Talas’s stooped shoulders and downcast eyes suggest the physical toll her daily labors exert.

Though Mori punctuates these moments of quiet reflection with dramatic, juicy scenes — a nighttime raid on the Eihon compound, an interrogation by Cossack soldiers, an angry confrontation between suitors — A Bride’s Story is at its best when it focuses on women’s daily lives. As this reviewer observes, Mori is not critiquing Central Asian society so much as depicting it in its full complexity. Mori never shies away from showing us how vulnerable women are in a patriarchal culture, as Talas’ situation demonstrates: without a father to arrange a new marriage for her, her late husbands’ relatives may claim her as property.

At the same time, however, Mori recognizes that women find small but meaningful ways to exercise their agency in such cultures, carving out a sphere of influence for themselves. She celebrates their wisdom and resilience, honoring their hard work by documenting it in minute detail. Perhaps that’s why I love A Bride’s Story so much; like Strawberry Girl and Little House in the Big Woods, A Bride’s Story helps me imagine what my daily life as a woman would have been like, warts and all, had I been born in another place and time. Highly recommended.

Review copy of volume three provided by Yen Press.

A BRIDE’S STORY, VOLS. 2-3 • BY KAORU MORI • YEN PRESS • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

A Bride’s Story, Vols. 2-3

by

Around the age of ten, I had a brief but intense love affair with historical fiction. It began with Little House in the Big Woods — required reading for all American girls of a certain age — and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I then discovered Johnny Tremain, made an unsuccessful attempt to read The Last of the Mohicans — way over my head, I’m afraid — and devoured Summer of My German Soldier.

The books that had the greatest claim on my heart, however, were Lois Lenski’s American regional novels: Strawberry Girl, Cotton in My Sack, Blue Ridge Billy, Mama Hattie’s Girl, and Shoo-Fly Girl. Looking back on these books now, I can see that they weren’t as meticulously crafted as Roll of Thunder or Johnny Tremain; Lenski’s writing was, at times, pedestrian, and her characterizations thin. What Lenski did well, however, was help young readers imagine what it was like to live in rural areas before television, telephones, and electricity were fixtures of the American home. Her books were filled with vivid descriptions of everyday activities: baking pies, picking crops, making dresses from patterns, canning vegetables, feeding chickens, washing clothes. From my sheltered point of view, Lenski’s characters led exotic, fascinating lives: who wouldn’t want to turn a bolt of calico into an actual dress, or spend the day picking berries? (The answer turns out to be me, as I flunked Home Economics.)

Though I’ve read my share of historical novels in the intervening years, I’ve seldom loved those books with the same fierce intensity as I did Strawberry Girl. Some of that disenchantment could be chalked up to adolescence: as a teenager, music superseded books as my most important form of escapism, and I read far fewer novels. And some of my disenchantment reflected my academic training: as a college student, I majored in History, taking courses that gave me the tools for exploring other places and times. Reading A Bride’s Story, however, reminded me how powerful good historical fiction can be.

A Bride’s Story depicts everyday life in a long-ago setting — in this case, Central Asia in the nineteenth century, where the fictional Eihon clan herd sheep and make textiles. To give readers a better understanding of the period, Kaoru Mori devotes entire chapters to describing how her characters live. In chapter 6 of A Bride’s Story, for example, Mori documents “oven day,” a communal event in which women prepare and bake bread. Mori captures the scene in meticulous detail, showing us how the women shape and stamp the dough into elaborate patterns. At the same time, however, Mori uses this gathering to explore the social dynamic within the Eihon clan; though none of the women are overtly hostile to new bride Amir, her inexperience and outsider status make it all but impossible for her to join the circle.

Other rituals are depicted with similar care. In chapter 10, for example, British anthropologist Henry Smith observes the Eihon women embroidering linen. Smith is a clever device: he serves as a natural reader surrogate, neatly anticipating the reader’s questions about the materials and cultural significance of the patterns. His questions serve another equally important purpose: they prompt Balkirsch, the clan matriarch, to identify the author of each design, explaining who she was and where she came from, in the process giving an informal history of the village.

Even in volume three, which introduces a new romantic subplot, Mori continues to document everyday activities in painstaking detail. Once again, Henry Smith serves as our eyes and ears, this time during a brief stay with two women he meets on the road to Ankara. Mori does a superb job of contrasting these women’s existence with the Eihons’: unlike the Eihons, who live in a thriving village, these women live alone on the edge of a vast plain, occupying two modest yurts with little in the way of possessions. Talas, the younger woman, must do the work of two people, grinding grain by hand, spinning wool, preparing meals, and tending a flock of sheep, following them on foot for miles each day. Though her face is youthful, her body language is not; in stark contrast to the physically robust Amir, Talas’s stooped shoulders and downcast eyes suggest the physical toll her daily labors exert.

Though Mori punctuates these moments of quiet reflection with dramatic, juicy scenes — a nighttime raid on the Eihon compound, an interrogation by Cossack soldiers, an angry confrontation between suitors — A Bride’s Story is at its best when it focuses on women’s daily lives. As this reviewer observes, Mori is not critiquing Central Asian society so much as depicting it in its full complexity. Mori never shies away from showing us how vulnerable women are in a patriarchal culture, as Talas’ situation demonstrates: without a father to arrange a new marriage for her, her late husbands’ relatives may claim her as property.

At the same time, however, Mori recognizes that women find small but meaningful ways to exercise their agency in such cultures, carving out a sphere of influence for themselves. She celebrates their wisdom and resilience, honoring their hard work by documenting it in minute detail. Perhaps that’s why I love A Bride’s Story so much; like Strawberry Girl and Little House in the Big Woods, A Bride’s Story helps me imagine what my daily life as a woman would have been like, warts and all, had I been born in another place and time. Highly recommended.

Review copy of volume three provided by Yen Press.

A BRIDE’S STORY, VOLS. 2-3 • BY KAORU MORI • YEN PRESS • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

A Bride’s Story, Vol. 1

by 29 Comments

For nearly 3,000 years, the Silk Road connected Asia with Africa and the Middle East, providing a conduit for the ancient world’s most precious commodities: silk, spices, glassware, medicine, perfume, livestock. By the nineteenth century, when A Bride’s Story takes place, the overland trade routes had been eclipsed in importance by maritime ones that linked China directly with India, Somalia, and the Mediterranean. Yet the Silk Road continued to play a vital role in bridging smaller geographical divides, as the main plot in A Bride’s Story demonstrates.

Set in Central Asia, A Bride’s Story focuses on two clans: the Halgal, a nomadic tribe whose livelihood depends on a mixture of hunting and herding, and the Eihon, farmers with a permanent homestead near the Caspian Sea. The families arrange a marriage between twenty-year-old Amir, the oldest Halgal daughter, and twelve-year-old Karluk, the future Eihon patriarch. As that age gap implies, Amir and Karluk’s union is one of political and economic expedience, designed to help the Eihon clan preserve its territory. Each family has reservations about the match: the Eihon believe that Amir is too old to bear Karluk a good-sized family, while the Halgal want to dissolve the union and betroth Amir to the leader of a neighboring tribe.

Amir and Karluk, however, seem more content with the arrangement than their elders. Given their age gap, Amir is more mother than wife to Karluk. There’s a note of urgency and purpose in Amir’s ministrations — she’s keen to prove her worth to the Eihons, especially when Karluk falls ill — but there’s also a genuine warmth and kindness in her gestures. Karluk, for his part, seems very much like a young teenager, intrigued by Amir’s beauty and charisma, but still too uncomfortable in his own skin to be physically demonstrative with her; Amir seems much keener to consummate their marriage, lest she lose her standing with the Eihon clan.

One of the great pleasures of A Bride’s Story is its strong cast of female characters. Balkirsh, the Eihon matriarch, proves Amir’s staunchest ally, fiercely rebuffing the Halgal’s efforts to reclaim Amir with a well-placed arrow. Though Balkirsh never explicitly states why she identifies with her daughter-in-law, the bow-and-arrow scene is telling, hinting at a shared cultural heritage that binds the two women. Amir, too, is a memorable character; she’s a terrific physical specimen, agile and fearless on horseback, but her true strength is her keen emotional intelligence. She accepts her new marriage without complaint, rapidly insinuating herself into the Eihon clan while preserving her own sense of self by introducing Karluk to her family’s customs.

The artwork, too, is another compelling reason to read A Bride’s Story. As she did in Emma and Shirley, Kaoru Mori pours her energy into period detail: clothing, furnishings, architecture. By far her most striking designs are the tribal costumes worn by the Eihon and the Halgal. Mori painstakingly draws embroidery, ornaments, and layers of fabric; watching Amir mount her horse, one can almost hear the swish of her skirts and the jingle of her earrings. Mori is similarly meticulous when rendering the surfaces of common household objects; she etches an intricate floral design into a silver tea set and weaves elegant, delicate patterns into the rugs that grace the walls and floors of the Eihon compound, luxuriating in the artistry with which these items were made.

At the same time, however, the Central Asian setting grants Mori greater license to make her characters move — something she rarely did in the overstuffed parlors  and crowded London streets in Emma and Shirley. To be sure, Mori’s flair for staging dynamic scenes was evident in Emma, when Hakim Atawari made a show-stopping entrance astride an elephant. In A Bride’s Story, however, Mori’s active sequences are less flashy and more fluid; they feel less like dramatic stunts than an organic part of the story, helping the reader understand how physically taxing Amir and Karluk’s labors are while helping us appreciate the scale and severity of the landscape.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of volume one is just how uneventful it is. Kaoru Mori is content to let her narrative follow the rhythms of everyday life, pausing to show us a master carver in his wood shop, or a group of women cooking a meal, or a young boy tending chickens. Yet A Bride’s Story is never dull, thanks to Mori’s smart, engaging dialogue; as she demonstrated in Emma and Shirley, Mori can make even the simplest moments revealing, whether her characters are preparing a manor house for the master’s return or discussing the merits of rabbit stew. By allowing her story to unfold in such a naturalistic fashion, A Bride’s Story manages to be both intimate and expansive, giving us a taste of what it might have been like to live along the Silk Road in the nineteenth century. Highly recommended.

A BRIDE’S STORY, VOL. 1 • BY KAORU MORI • YEN PRESS • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

A Bride’s Story, Vol. 1

by

For nearly 3,000 years, the Silk Road connected Asia with Africa and the Middle East, providing a conduit for the ancient world’s most precious commodities: silk, spices, glassware, medicine, perfume, livestock. By the nineteenth century, when A Bride’s Story takes place, the overland trade routes had been eclipsed in importance by maritime ones that linked China directly with India, Somalia, and the Mediterranean. Yet the Silk Road continued to play a vital role in bridging smaller geographical divides, as the main plot in A Bride’s Story demonstrates.

Set in Central Asia, A Bride’s Story focuses on two clans: the Halgal, a nomadic tribe whose livelihood depends on a mixture of hunting and herding, and the Eihon, farmers with a permanent homestead near the Caspian Sea. The families arrange a marriage between twenty-year-old Amir, the oldest Halgal daughter, and twelve-year-old Karluk, the future Eihon patriarch. As that age gap implies, Amir and Karluk’s union is one of political and economic expedience, designed to help the Eihon clan preserve its territory. Each family has reservations about the match: the Eihon believe that Amir is too old to bear Karluk a good-sized family, while the Halgal want to dissolve the union and betroth Amir to the leader of a neighboring tribe.

Amir and Karluk, however, seem more content with the arrangement than their elders. Given their age gap, Amir is more mother than wife to Karluk. There’s a note of urgency and purpose in Amir’s ministrations — she’s keen to prove her worth to the Eihons, especially when Karluk falls ill — but there’s also a genuine warmth and kindness in her gestures. Karluk, for his part, seems very much like a young teenager, intrigued by Amir’s beauty and charisma, but still too uncomfortable in his own skin to be physically demonstrative with her; Amir seems much keener to consummate their marriage, lest she lose her standing with the Eihon clan.

One of the great pleasures of A Bride’s Story is its strong cast of female characters. Balkirsh, the Eihon matriarch, proves Amir’s staunchest ally, fiercely rebuffing the Halgal’s efforts to reclaim Amir with a well-placed arrow. Though Balkirsh never explicitly states why she identifies with her daughter-in-law, the bow-and-arrow scene is telling, hinting at a shared cultural heritage that binds the two women. Amir, too, is a memorable character; she’s a terrific physical specimen, agile and fearless on horseback, but her true strength is her keen emotional intelligence. She accepts her new marriage without complaint, rapidly insinuating herself into the Eihon clan while preserving her own sense of self by introducing Karluk to her family’s customs.

The artwork, too, is another compelling reason to read A Bride’s Story. As she did in Emma and Shirley, Kaoru Mori pours her energy into period detail: clothing, furnishings, architecture. By far her most striking designs are the tribal costumes worn by the Eihon and the Halgal. Mori painstakingly draws embroidery, ornaments, and layers of fabric; watching Amir mount her horse, one can almost hear the swish of her skirts and the jingle of her earrings. Mori is similarly meticulous when rendering the surfaces of common household objects; she etches an intricate floral design into a silver tea set and weaves elegant, delicate patterns into the rugs that grace the walls and floors of the Eihon compound, luxuriating in the artistry with which these items were made.

At the same time, however, the Central Asian setting grants Mori greater license to make her characters move — something she rarely did in the overstuffed parlors  and crowded London streets in Emma and Shirley. To be sure, Mori’s flair for staging dynamic scenes was evident in Emma, when Hakim Atawari made a show-stopping entrance astride an elephant. In A Bride’s Story, however, Mori’s active sequences are less flashy and more fluid; they feel less like dramatic stunts than an organic part of the story, helping the reader understand how physically taxing Amir and Karluk’s labors are while helping us appreciate the scale and severity of the landscape.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of volume one is just how uneventful it is. Kaoru Mori is content to let her narrative follow the rhythms of everyday life, pausing to show us a master carver in his wood shop, or a group of women cooking a meal, or a young boy tending chickens. Yet A Bride’s Story is never dull, thanks to Mori’s smart, engaging dialogue; as she demonstrated in Emma and Shirley, Mori can make even the simplest moments revealing, whether her characters are preparing a manor house for the master’s return or discussing the merits of rabbit stew. By allowing her story to unfold in such a naturalistic fashion, A Bride’s Story manages to be both intimate and expansive, giving us a taste of what it might have been like to live along the Silk Road in the nineteenth century. Highly recommended.

A BRIDE’S STORY, VOL. 1 • BY KAORU MORI • YEN PRESS • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)