Awards
Winner of the 2001 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2001 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
"This novel’s poignancy, I think, comes from the paradoxical confrontation between innocence and experience these Asian strivers are caught in—at the same time that they are rendered childlike by ignorance of their new culture, we know they have been singed and seared, and therefore secretly toughened. Immigration is such a significant phenomenon right now that this tension between competency and confusion, maturity and infantilization is an enormously fecund subject for a novelist with a well-developed sense of irony."—From the Foreword by Rosellen Brown
In an essay written for his ESL class, a young student describes his flight from Vietnam at the age of 12, in a fishing boat with three friends. They were beaten by Thai pirates, fell faint with hunger and pain, until they were "pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God." The phrase evokes an overriding metaphor for this resonant first novel by Kate Gadbow, in which a community of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees struggles to maintain balance between the world they fled and the one they are currently negotiating in Missoula, Montana. Gadbow meshes the lives of these refugees with that of the book’s narrator Janet Hunter, a teacher struggling to manage contemporary life, with a failed marriage and a string of disappointments haunting her own past.
In a deceptively simple prose style that reads like easy conversation, and with an admirable lack of sentimentality, Kate Gadbow has written a remarkable novel depicting the clash of cultures and the difficult realities inherent to a world given only to constant change, where the harbor of a kind shore seems frustratingly out of reach.
Kate Gadbow directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she lives with her husband, journalist Daryl Gadbow.
Review
"Gadbow's characterizations are astute, but her detailed chronicle of Janet's very ordinary life conversations with single friend Judy, a romance with the lawyer who defends Pao in court, a week's bout with the flu grows tedious. Most memorable is the novel's sensitive portrayal of the fragile hopes of young Hmong and Vietnamese refugees." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A quiet portrait, in a plain and straightforward style, of simple and unassuming people who rise above horrendous tribulations." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Gadbow writes in straightforward, conversational prose that gradually draws the reader into a story about the sadness and beauty of life. Recommended..." Library Journal
Review
"Kate Gadbow makes the well-intentioned but emotionally insecure Janet a realistic and largely likable character. But the first-person narration traps the reader within the narrow compass of Janet's flawed perceptions. A foreword by Rosellen Brown focuses on the refugees and their emblematic plight. The story itself, however, leans in a more limited and conventional direction." Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe
Review
"An aura of sadness and quiet hopefulness lingered for me for a long time after I finished this novel. Its poignancy, I think, comes from the paradoxical confrontation between innocence and experience these Asian strivers are caught in at the same time that they are rendered childlike by ignorance of their new culture, we know they have been singed and seared, and therefore secretly toughened. Emigration/immigration is such a significant phenomenon right now (as it was a century ago, but in a simpler America) that this tension between competency and confusion, maturity and infantilization is an enormously fecund subject for a novelist with a well-developed sense of irony." Rosellen Brown, from the Foreword
Synopsis
In an essay written for his ESL class, a young student describes his flight from Vietnam at the age of twelve, in a fishing boat with three friends. They were beaten by Thai pirates, fell faint with hunger and pain, until they were pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God. The phrase evokes an overriding metaphor for this resonant first novel by Kate Gadbow, in which a community of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees struggles to maintain balance between the world they fled and the one they are currently negotiating in Missoula, Montana. Gadbow meshes the lives of these refugees with that of the book's narrator Janet Hunter, a teacher struggling to manage contemporary life, with a failed marriage and a string of disappointments haunting her own past.
But in her classroom she strives to focus on these students and their disrupted lives, in the hope that she just might be able to make a small, positive difference: There is Vinh Le, the essay writer; Youa Vang, a silent, obsessive arranger of desk details; Mee Moua, the classroom leader, and, perhaps most of all, there is the ghostly figure of Pao a Hmong student who appears unable to make the transition from the horrors of the country he has escaped to the fraught realities of a society he does not understand, and who shocks both cultures with an irrevocable act of violence.
In a deceptively simple prose style that reads like easy conversation, and with an admirable lack of sentimentality, Kate Gadbow has written a remarkable novel depicting the clash of cultures and the difficult realities inherent to a world given only to constant change, where the harbor of a kind shore seems frustratingly out of reach.
About the Author
Kate Gadbow is the 2001 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Rosellen Brown. Her stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Northwest Review, Cutbank, Talking River Review, and elsewhere. She coedited The Quill Reader, published in 2000 by Harcourt Brace. She directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she lives with her husband, journalist Daryl Gadbow. Their grown children, Grady and Alison, are fifth-generation Montanans.
Series Description
Pushed to Shore is the fifty-third title to be published by Sarabande Books, a nonprofit literary press headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Founded in 1994 to publish poetry and short fiction, Sarabande's mission is to disburse these works with diligence and integrity, and to serve as an educational resource to teachers and students of creative writing. Since the 1996 debut of the press, our titles have received positive review attention from nationally distinguished media including The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, American Book Review, Small Press, The Nation, and Library Journal.