ALA Booklist (Mon Feb 01 00:00:00 CST 1993)

Yuki is 12 when her mother, Shizuko, commits suicide, leaving Yuki to a distant father and a self-serving stepmother. Forbidden by custom from seeing her mother's family, Yuki is left to fend for herself; and she does, falling back on the artistic talent she inherited from her mother. After an adolescence spent in protective, self-imposed, and largely unchallenged isolation, Yuki rises from her mother's ashes, leaving her father's house in Kobe to study art in Nagasaki, and taking her first steps toward a productive adulthood. A plot summation cannot convey Mori's accomplishment--her language and imagery evoke the beautiful and sometimes stifling sense of order that pervades Yuki's life. The harmony and tyranny of tradition are both present, made concrete by the comparison between the reverent home of Yuki's maternal grandparents and the sterile house so assiduously cleaned by her stepmother. Custom is both venerable and comforting, but Mori warns against its confinement in controlled, poetically crafted prose that is ultimately affirming. Mori has a fine eye for details that illuminate temperament and motivation, and her characters, especially Yuki, are well-realized and clearly drawn.

Horn Book

Mori's moving and unforgettable novel paints pictures with words as she recounts the struggles of a modern Japanese teenager coming to terms with her mother's suicide.

Kirkus Reviews

Mori (Creative Writing/Saint Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin) returns to her native Japan for a lyrical first novel with the intensity of remembered grief. Yuki's gentle mother commits suicide after assuring the anxious 12-year-old that she is ``all right.'' Like her mother Shizuko, to whom she was exceptionally close, Yuki is talented and resilient; but she too is thwarted by a restrictive society and a miserable family situation. For Shizuko, there was no hope—though she loved her daughter, her husband was cold, dictatorial, and usually absent; and though (as Yuki will learn) she was once attracted to a more congenial man, she would have lost Yuki in a divorce. Life becomes nearly as bleak for Yuki: her father marries his mistress, who is obsessively antagonistic to Yuki, and he prevents Yuki from communicating with her mother's loving relatives. Even Yuki's talents are stumbling blocks to friendship: highly intelligent, creative, assertive, she doesn't fit into the traditional Japan of the 70's. Only at 18 does she break free by rejecting the fine local university to go to a distant art school. Still compulsively gauche, in the end she mellows toward her grandparents and makes a strong friendship with the promise of blossoming into love. A beautifully written book about a bitterly painful coming of age, intensified by exquisite sensory motifs—flavors and aromas, light and color, the weight and ornamentation of clothing. Yuki's unsympathetically portrayed father may not be fully realized; but like Suzanne Staples's Shabanu (1989), Yuki is unforgettable. A splendid debut. (Fiction. 12+)"

School Library Journal

Gr 7 Up-- Shizuko kills herself, escaping a soured marriage, leaving her husband free to marry his mistress of eight years, and having vague ideas about making her daughter's life better. Yuki, 12, now faces a bleak world with a stepmother who tries to eradicate all traces of her predecessor and curtail the girl's visits to her mother's family. Her father is distant, taciturn, and guilt ridden, providing neither the support Yuki needs nor the discipline the stepmother wants him to exercise over the girl. Most of all, Yuki must cope with the loss of her mother and piece together some meaning for her death and ultimately for her life. Through strength and independence, Yuki comes to grips with her mother's memory, deals with her own current plight, and makes plans for the future. Readers leave her in college after a painful and poignant maturing. Mori's beautiful and sensitive prose evokes a world of pungent memories and harsh realities. Communication between characters often reflects the vagueness of language favored by the Japanese, pointing up Yuki's bluntness with great skill. Despite moments of warmth and humor and sharp insights into human motivations, Shizuko's Daughter is more often bleak, sad, and sometimes grim. Graceful in style, a tad grizzly in plot, and rather adult in tone, it is nonetheless a worthwhile novel about a resilient young woman's coming of age. --John Philbrook, San Francisco Public Library