YubaLit presents Christian Kiefer's PHANTOMS

Kiefer’s novel Phantoms is dedicated to these families: The Asazawas, the Nakashimas, the Yoshidas, and many more. And it imagines the experience of a fictional family, the Takahashis, whose son Ray fought in World War II while his parents and siblings were sent to the camps. Decades later, a Vietnam veteran, John Wilson, returns to the Placer County land he and Ray both knew as home, and begins to piece together the entwined history of their families: The Wilsons who rented their property to the skilled Japanese-American farmers, and the Takahashis, who were sent away on buses, their lives forever changed.

The critical reception for Phantoms has been rapturous. A starred Kirkus review raves: “It’s a complex narrative structure, but this allows Kiefer to constantly overlay past and present and to recognize, through John [Wilson], the cycles in which his character, and in fact the country, remains trapped—cycles of racism,…