Review: How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway

Nothing could have been different in the circumstances I was in.  The person I used to be could have only made one choice; the grown-up Shoko might have made a different one.  That was how life was.  You only figured out the right thing after you were old.

(from How to Be an American Housewife, page 136 in the ARC)

Margaret Dilloway used her mother’s experiences as the basis for her new novel, How to Be an American Housewife.  The fictional Shoko left Japan right after World War II as the wife of an American GI.  An immigrant unfamiliar with American culture, Shoko didn’t fit in with the other wives and mothers, but she did her best to make a home for Charlie and their children, Mike and Suiko (Sue).  Her younger brother, Taro, opposed her marriage, and she hasn’t spoken to him in decades.  A weakened heart (probably due to radiation from the bombing of Nagasaki during the war) and an impending surgery make it impossible for Shoko to travel to Japan and heal her broken relationship with Taro.

Shoko persuades her daughter, Sue, to make the trip for her.  Sue has problems of her own; she’s a single mother to 12-year-old, wise-beyond-her-years Helena and stuck in a job she hates.  For years, she felt what she thought was her mother’s disapproval, but the trip to Japan offers an opportunity for Sue to strengthen her relationship with her mother and find herself.

How to Be an American Housewife reminds me of the Japanese version of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.  If you know me well, you’ll understand this is high praise, as The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books.  Like The Joy Luck Club, How to Be an American Housewife emphasizes the conflict between Asian-born mothers and their American-born daughters, the struggle to understand and adopt a new culture, and of course, the discovery of family secrets. Also, the American-born daughter is sent on a trip to the home land to meet long-lost relatives.

Dilloway includes excerpts from a fictional homemaking guide, “How to Be an American Housewife,” at the beginning of each chapter, based on a book her father gave her mother when they married, The American Way of Housekeeping.  She also tells the story from both Shoko’s and Sue’s points of view, with Shoko dominating the book and shifting from past to present and Sue’s narrative taking over as she embarks on the trip to Japan.  I was captivated by both stories, from Shoko’s tales of forbidden love and how the war changed everything to Sue’s desire to change her life.  I loved all three of the main characters:  Shoko for her strength and courage, Sue because I related to her need to chase the dreams she put off when she started a family, and Helena for convincing her mother to embrace change.

It’s hard to believe that How to Be an American Housewife is Dilloway’s first novel.  Her tender treatment of the characters and their problems appealed to me and kept the book from getting too heavy.  Although somewhat predictable and neatly tied up in the end, I couldn’t help but get caught up in the story from the very beginning.  I can’t get enough of books about World War II, mother-daughter relationships, Japanese culture, and the immigrant experience, and Dilloway does a brilliant job combining all of these themes into a single novel.  While I was satisfied with the ending, I wasn’t ready to let these characters go, which makes me believe How to Be an American Housewife is yet another book to add to my list of the best books I’ve read this year.  (I count myself lucky to have read so many good books recently!)

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for allowing me to participate in the blog tour for How to Be an American Housewife.  Click here to check out the other tour dates.

Disclosure: I received a copy of How to Be an American Housewife from Putnam/Penguin for review purposes. I am an Amazon associate.

© 2010 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

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