Description
Book SynopsisWhat is considered a family, and who gets to define it? In 1964, despite the racial tension occurring in a post–WWII America, Catherine and Jonathan adopt a baby girl from Korea. This unconventional choice brings disapproval from Catherine’s family, which creates an even closer bond between her and her daughter. Narrated in alternating chapters by Catherine, her adopted daughter Min, and Min’s best friend Laura,
Scissors, Paper, Stone spans twenty years of love, loss, and the complex reality of female relationships. By 1985 Catherine is living a risk-free life on her own accord, Laura is dating her way through college, and Min is a massage therapist who has come out as a lesbian and is learning to embrace her Korean heritage. After Min and Laura take a summer road trip together, the shifts in their friendship force all three women to examine the assumptions they’ve been living by and to make choices about the roles they want to play in each other’s lives.Trade Review"A compelling family drama resonant with feminist and queer issues, Martha K. Davis’s
Scissors, Paper, Stone neatly captures the grit of intimacy as relationships expand and contract...Davis sustains a beautiful tension between the women. Despite all that distances them, they’re in each other’s lives for good or ill. Like the children’s game of the title, they come together, face off, and drift apart, though at heart they’re a set, compelled to find the parts that complete it in each other, even if their connections are attended by confrontation." --Foreword Reviews -- Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers * LITERARY / LGBT FICTION *
"The story is told in the alternating voices of Catherine, Min, and Min’s longtime best friend, Laura, and covers 21 years, from 1964 to '85. Set in the predominantly white San Francisco suburb in which the family lives, it addresses numerous additional topics—Min’s coming out as a lesbian, her parents’ divorce, the creation of dozens of LGBTQ institutions that developed to challenge homophobia, and the difficulties that all young people face as they attempt to navigate long-term relationships. Min’s sexuality—some scenes are pretty graphic—and the tensions that arise between her and Catherine combine to make the novel an intense and compelling read. A terrific bildungsroman featuring three women who are by turns fascinating and bewildering but ultimately worth championing."--Kirkus Reviews
"Davis’s debut novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone, delivers intergenerational, women-centered narratives that illustrate how close personal connections can be realized in wonderfully idiosyncratic ways. Each of these stories is told in first-person, giving readers intimate access to the outward and inward experiences of three women. Catherine’s, Min’s, and Laura’s narratives are told in graceful, though not overly flowery, prose. These characters are dynamic; their spoken and inner dialogues are believable; and their worlds are simultaneously distinct and relatable. The sentence-level writing in the book makes it an enjoyable read, but it’s the overarching themes that make the novel especially compelling. The subject I find most pressing is how each storyline ruptures the construct of kinship. Catherine’s story troubles the idea that familial bonds necessarily be tethered by biological connection. Laura’s story illustrates an element of curation in family-building. And Min’s story demonstrates how tribes can be organized around desire, making way for a refreshing kind of queer kinship." -- -- JESS TRAVERS * Realizing Queer Kinship *
“With
Scissors, Paper, Stone, Martha K. Davis has given us an ambitious coming of (lesbian) age story that is a movingly honest inquiry into the messy, yet still beautiful, transmogrification of what it means to be a family in a post–WWII America ruptured by racism, homophobia, . . . and the generational divide. The character of Cathy, the idealistic and unsuspecting . . . single mother of an adopted Korean child, is one for the ages: a vessel for all the good intentions and fumbling contradictions of her time.”—
Celeste Gainey, author of
the GAFFER, final judge for the 2016 Quill Award
“Martha K. Davis writes with rare insight and compassion about the evolving American family and the struggle to belong. Scissors, Paper, Stone is a wise and affecting novel.”—Hilma Wolitzer, author of The Doctor's Daughter and An Available Man
