"Sarah Bird's Best Ever - Highly recommended"

The Yokota Officers Club is Sarah Bird's best ever, surpassing even The Boyfriend School and Virgin of the Rodeo. I found myself laughing out loud in a crowded airport terminal, transported from the tedium of flight delays to the compelling and often hilarious world of US overseas military bases.

The story weaves back and forth between the present, set in 1968, and the past of the 1950s. The suspense mounts as the story progresses and the main character Bernie Root pieces together the events which sidelined her father's promising career and left her parents estranged from each other. The author uses the time-shift device to advantage to let the reader see events through the child's eyes and then filtered through the reflective eyes of a young adult who is coming to understand their significance.

You don't have to be a military brat to enjoy this book. Although I didn't grow up in a military family, I could easily relate to the story's family dynamics and insights into the tensions between career and family life. The book is full of the vivid smells, sights, songs, and vernacular of the early Vietnam era.

Pop music buffs will enjoy testing themselves on tune recall. You'll never hear 'Brown-Eyed Girl' again without superimposing the pirated lyrics which the Taiwanese transcriber rendered as 'Hey Roderigo! Dates when no raking!' instead of 'Hey where did we go, days when the rain came.'

Even the shoe size incident struck home. It made me remember the time when a giggling sales clerk ushered me over to the men's section of a Tokyo shoe store because she knew that nothing in the women's section would be big enough to fit my size 9s. At least I didn't have to squeeze my feet into go go boots four sizes too small and dance onstage like our heroine Bernie Root.

But beware - the story will draw you in. The final chapters were so engrossing that I nearly missed my flight. Absorbed in the book, I tuned out all the boarding announcements till the final call. Then I went scrambling to the jet bridge, careful not to lose my place as I handed my boarding pass to the gate agent. Better to miss a flight than to miss this book, the latest effort from this extraordinary author.

-Judith Williams

Reviewed by Guest Reviewer
Posted September 26, 2001

Summary

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: