Yokota Officers Club

Sarah Bird's gutsy, sharp, and touching new novel opens at full speed.

Bernadette "Bernie" Root, military brat, speaks. She has never really noticed what a peculiar bunch of nomads her eight-member Air Force family is (with the exception of her Post Princess sister, Kit), until the summer after her first year of college when she joins them at their new assignment: Kadena Air Base, Okinawa.

Just as Okinawa turns out to be a sorry version of the Japanese paradise Bernie knew in her childhood at Yokota Air Base, her family, especially her once-beautiful mother, Moe, and her former spy-pilot father, Mace, seems to have been in decline since those glory days of the American Raj. Days when her mother was happy and their best friend, Fumiko, now lost to them, was the family’s maid. The worst part of Okinawa for Bernie, though, is realizing how perfectly she fits with her oddball family and how badly she needs to get out.

So when a dance contest first prize, a trip to Japan, offers a chance to escape, she takes it, playing second banana to a third-rate comedian on a tour of Japan’s military bases. At their grand finale at the Yokota Officers’ Club, Fumiko finally reappears, and Bernie discovers the terrible price that is paid when the secrets nations hide end up buried within families.

A brilliantly appealing novel whose energy, wit, and feeling have won for it extraordinary advance praise.

"A delightful heroine...sharp and snarky." Publishers Weekly

"A book of incisive wit and poignancy." BookPage

"The miracle of The Yokota Officers Club is that it defies the laws of its own gravity. How can a story about dispossession and unspeakable loss, about fading national glory and family heartbreak, be so consistently — and authentically — hilarious? Sarah Bird's novel is an unforgettable melding of exuberant wit and deep compassion." Stephen Harrigan

"Who else can write about dancing, music, JP-4 fuel, the military, and strawberries, make it funny, and also make it about matters of the heart? Only Sarah Bird. This is her best book yet, a big book that you'll want to read again as soon as you finish it the first time." Clyde Edgerton

"The first half of this book will make you scream with laughter. The second half will tear your heart out. Very few novelists have gotten the military brat story right. Believe me, Sarah Bird gets it right. For the first time we have a writer as dead-on as Pat Conroy, but from the daughter's point of view. We are so very lucky that Sarah Bird has brought her immense talents to the telling of our story." Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress

"From the family car to forbidden airspace, this is a wonderful book. If you've ever been a sibling, a parent, a spy, a spouse, a flyer, a teenager, an entertainer, an outsider....Or if you've ever felt trapped." Roy Blount, Jr.

"Sweet, powerful, and terrifying, Sarah Bird's talent, always substantial, achieves in The Yokota Officers Club an even greater depth and force that is nothing less than wondrous. This book is a beautiful and breathtaking treasure, and I thank her for it." Rick Bass

"Sarah Bird's world, viewed through the eyes and memories of a sassy Air Force brat, is our world: tender, hurtful, complex, unexplained. She captures the certainty we all have growing up, that we are the serpent who drove our parents out of the Eden of our childhood. Funny, wrenching, singularly moving, The Yokota Officers Club is a marvelous story. You'll want to share it with everyone who knew you when." Shelby Hearon

"A bittersweet and often funny novel about being different; about secrets; and about what happens when the luster fades. Sarah Bird is a wonderful writer." Lee Smith

Sarah Bird is the author of four previous novels: Virgin of the Rodeo, The Boyfriend School, Alamo House, and The Mommy Club. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, George, and son, Gabriel.

Sarah Bird’s gutsy, sharp, and touching new novel opens at full speed.

Bernadette "Bernie" Root, military brat, speaks. She has never really noticed what a peculiar bunch of nomads her eight-member Air Force family is (with the exception of her Post Princess sister, Kit), until the summer after her first year of college when she joins them at their new assignment: Kadena Air Base, Okinawa.

Just as Okinawa turns out to be a sorry version of the Japanese paradise Bernie knew in her childhood at Yokota Air Base, her family, especially her once-beautiful mother, Moe, and her former spy-pilot father, Mace, seems to have been in decline since those glory days of the American Raj. Days when her mother was happy and their best friend, Fumiko, now lost to them, was the family’s maid. The worst part of Okinawa for Bernie, though, is realizing how perfectly she fits with her oddball family and how badly she needs to get out.

So when a dance contest first prize, a trip to Japan,offers a chance to escape, she takes it, playing second banana to a third-rate comedian on a tour of Japan’s military bases. At their grand finale at the Yokota Officers’ Club, Fumiko finally reappears, and Bernie discovers the terrible price that is paid when the secrets nations hide end up buried within families.

A brilliantly appealing novel whose energy, wit, and feeling have won for it (see back of the jacket) extraordinary advance praise.

1. Smells play a major role in The Yokota Officers Club. They are
even used as titles for each chapter. What effect did they have on
you as a reader?

2. The central image/metaphor of the book is the perfume factory.
At the end of the book, Bernie says: "That honeysuckle is but
one link in an endless limbic chain that contains all the smells
of my family and of our life together." Then she goes on to
name all the smells in the book, concluding that "each smell
is a blossom that combines with all the other smells the same
way real flowers would in a real perfume factory where the days
of sunshine and growing, the days of storm and drought, the
times of plenty, times of want, what the flowers got, what they
didn't get, they're all squeezed together under preposterous
pressure or boiled or tinctured or distilled into a few drops of a
smell so beautiful it can make you remember everything." Do
you agree with this metaphor of how family unity/memories are
created?

3. Understanding what you do about Moe, Macon, Fumiko, and
Bernie, is there anything any of them could have done to change
their fate?

4. Are the pressures a military life puts on soldiers--particularly the
kind of military life Macon Root had, involving highly classified,
highly dangerous missions--compatible with being a warm and
loving spouse? Parent?

5. Have you known any military families? How much did you know
about their lives? Did the novel give you a greater appreciation of
those lives?

6. It seems that military brats enjoyed their peripatetic childhoods
in direct relation to how extroverted they were. The more outgoing
they naturally were, the more they thrived on the constant
moving. How do you think you would have fared as a military
child? As a military wife?

7. Have you ever had an experience similar to the one Bernie had
when you return to the scene of a childhood memory and find it
strangely shrunken or diminished in some way? How is this idea
of a diminution, of a degradation, of, in some cases, a fall from
grace, carried out in other ways in the book? In Bernie's experience
of Okinawa as contrasted with her memories of Japan? In
Mace's career? In the military in general from World War II to
the Vietnam War? In Moe's experience both with the military and
with her marriage?

8. Did you ever reveal a secret as a child? What were the consequences?
Can Bernie or any child of that age be held responsible
for unkept secrets?

9. Moe and Mace seem to have come to a stalemate in their marriage.
Who is responsible? What do you predict will happen to
them? What do you think should happen?

10. Contrast the two mothers in the book, Moe and Fumiko's mother.
How does each one react to the stresses placed upon her and her
family by their respective countries?

11. One of the themes of the novel is silence, the silence of men flying
reconnaissance missions, but more especially the silence of
the women around them. How does each of these characters find
her voice: Bernie? Moe? Fumiko?

12. This novel straddles the line between fiction and memoir. Does it
take the best from each approach or the worst? What do you like
and dislike about the two different approaches?

13. Did you believe that Mace and Fumiko had had an affair? Were
you relieved that they hadn't?

14. Since Bernie could not have ever seen her father acting as
Wingo's co-pilot, how is the crucial relationship they had in flight
demonstrated?

15. Humor and tragedy collide throughout the novel. Do you prefer
fiction that blends these parts of life or keeps them separate?