Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's new novel is Harmless Like You. From her interview with NPR's Scott Simon:

SIMON: Please tell us about your central character, if we could, Yuki. She's a teenager living in New York in the late '60s. And her parents leave to go back to Japan, and she decides she doesn't want to leave New York. Does she leave them, too?

BUCHANAN: I don't think that she would see it that way. I think she doesn't realize how long it will be before she ever sees them again because, at that time, it would have been harder for her to travel. And she is trying to figure out herself in the city, and she doesn't want them to see her until she's figured it out. And the figuring out takes a lot longer than she thinks it's going to. To answer your question another way, at least in my experience, I think children rarely realize how much their parents need them.

SIMON: She ends up with a guy I don't like at all, Lou. Without giving anything away, he's the only one in the novel I think is guilty of anything really serious.

BUCHANAN: I'm sure somebody could write a novel about a man like Lou where you would understand exactly his history and exactly where he was coming from. But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue