“Cinnamon Beach” by Suzanne Kamata
“Multicultural family” does not adequately describe the relationships among the characters in Suzanne Kamata’s Cinnamon Beach (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2024). Characters who are Indian American, Black, Japanese, American Japanese, white, hearing impaired, and gender fluid people this novel. Add in family members with chronic illnesses related to aging, and the character who has died by suicide, and who is the catalyst for the story, and it is difficult to imagine Kamata has left a demographic unrepresented.
Kamata tackles vital cultural issues, including suicide, grief, interracial/intercultural relationships, caregiver issues, and more, in this work. Any one of these could have been the subject of the novel, which did not dive as deeply into any of them as this reviewer would have liked.
Kamata titles each chapter with a character’s name, but it was not always clear that a given chapter expressed that character’s point of view. It was clear, however, that this book is a lovely beach read, with some plot twists at the end that will entice the reader to read more of Kamata’s work.
Suzanne Kamata
Kamata’s perspectives on diversity in family and friendship relationships comes from her life and members of her own family. She is author of four previous novels, a short story collection, and editor of three anthologies. She has received awards from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Independent Publisher’s Association, SCBWI, and Half the World Global Literati Awards.
–Reviewed by Deb Bowen
Other Notable Titles
To Absent Friends: Eudora Welty’s Correspondence with Frank Lyell (UMiss Press 2025), edited by Julia Eichelberger, forms an epistolary narrative of Welty’s writing life and her nearly fifty-year friendship with Frank Lyell, a friend from Jackson, Mississippi. These letters document a remarkable artist’s responses to her time and place and a sparkling friendship.
Fire Ants: Essays Around and About Texarkana by Cason O’Banion (Stephen F. Austin University Press: Nov 2025. a vivid, funny, and heartfelt set of 24 essays about East Texas and Texarkana — people, families, Protestant cults, Waffle House breakfasts, WCW wrestling, and the strange poetry of ordinary Southern life. Several of the essays have been Pushcart-nominated, and one earned a Pushcart Prize.
One Hundred Pearls by Barry M. Cole (Livingston Press 2025) Barry Cole originated the idea for this historically based novel many years ago after a trip to a mass grave in Central Alabama at Tannehill State Park. Roupe’s Valley Furnaces (later Tannehill State Park) relied on the forced labor of nearly six hundred enslaved human beings to manufacture pig iron under hellish conditions. Molten lava was forged into bullets and cannonballs used by the Confederates to keep them enslaved. An inferno of fire and brimstone blazed a trail for Cole to encounter the mythical Sadie, the novel’s protagonist, who lived one hundred years and turned the tables on her slaveholding captors. Sadie’s remarkable story embodies the lived experience of a silent multitude buried under unchiseled rocks with no names. Her powerful voice and vision offer a lens into their forgotten stories and chastises any attempt to rewrite the bloody history of American Slavery.
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