Reviews

“Scissors, Paper, Stone, by Martha K. Davis, begins with Catherine and her brother, Andy, running away from home as children. Catherine grows up and marries Jonathan; both experience alienation from their families and together arrive at a decision to adopt a Korean child. In their teens in the 1950s, both had listened to radio reports of abandoned, orphaned children…during the Korean War. In 1964, they adopt Min… Catherine initially finds solace protecting her child against ostracism. Things soon fall apart.

… Alienation, identity, and the question of who makes up family are the themes weaving through the book in the narratives of Catherine, Min, and Laura, a classmate of Min’s… Scissors, Paper, Stone is a game called by a variety of names… The winner triumphs by one object’s power over the other: Scissors cuts paper, paper covers stone, and stone crushes scissors. The three narratives that dominate this book are symbolic of the power-based, decision-making tools… Told throughout with poetic images and metaphor, the three lives change in relationship to the others—in defiant opposition—until a new kind of relationship is established.”

“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…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.

Scissors, Paper, Stone reminds me to keep putting pressure on my own prejudices about what makes family, and it challenges me to keep rethinking desire. These are not easy tasks for a book to take on, but Davis’s novel rises to the occasion by pointing to the limitations of defining family by way of biology or ethnicity and by inviting the possibility for kinship to be realized in divergent, queer ways.”

“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.

‘We had been walking for over an hour before I realized I was actually running away, or at least investigating how it could be done.’ These words hang in the air as the novel follows an evolving relationship between Catherine, Min, and Laura between 1964 and 1985. …

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.”

“Questions of identity are bound to arise when children of color are adopted by white parents. Korea-born Min is adopted by white Americans Catherine and Jonathan in 1964 when she’s just a few months old; they try to nurture and love her as best they can, but race nags. Catherine’s younger brother, Andy, for one, will barely look at Min and, in a particularly explosive fight, declares that he will never accept the child as his niece…. Andy, sadly, is not the only person to react this way, but it’s his rejection that stings Catherine the most. As Andy’s hateful words penetrate, they slowly undermine Catherine’s confidence as a parent. It’s brutal, if beautifully wrought. Indeed, as the novel unfolds and Min comes of age, we crash head-on into the sometimes-subtle and sometimes-overt bigotry that she experiences.

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,…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…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.”

“A sensitive story of three women: a Korean daughter, her white adopting mother, and her best white childhood friend, are pulled together and torn apart by different understandings of race and lesbian identity…

Davis does a fine job of addressing the complexities of lesbian life. She writes about women’s relationships with each other within the lesbian community and between lesbians and non-lesbians. She does so with a certain subtlety that can help readers grasp what often goes unnoticed. She shows a real talent for dealing sympathetically with all sides of conflict. The variety among lesbians is clearly revealed as well as how racism divides individuals…

I strongly recommend this book, especially for those of us who are not lesbians and want to understand other women’s lives.”

“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…mother of an adopted Korean child, is one for the ages: a vessel for all the good intentions and fumbling contradictions of her time.”

“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.”

“In Scissors, Paper, Stone, Martha K. Davis has a coming of age narrative that shimmers with authenticity. Entire passages correlated to my own memories of becoming self-aware as a young lesbian through the intensity of a best friendship; and the language—‘a summer of held breath, a season of suspense’—is right on. Davis shows that even an imperfect and struggle-bound arrival into the lesbian community of the 1970s/80s was, in her words, ‘a homecoming to a place I hadn’t known existed. I felt I had been born just to experience this moment.’”