Michael Kluckner
Toshiko

Review by Norman Ravvin in The Canadian Jewish News

Toshiko is history well told.

Kluckner has made his reputation as a careful historian of Vancouver and the B.C. landscape, through his wonderful watercolours of what he has dubbed “vanishing Vancouver.” In Toshiko, narrative is pushed along by Kluckner’s light-handed drawings of the B.C. interior, where Canadian Japanese were “relocated” during World War II after being dispossessed of their homes, businesses and fishing boats, and their birthright in Canadian society.

 

Review by Patricia Roy in BC Studies, The British Columbian Quarterly

As one expects from Kluckner, the black and white drawings in the many panels are superb.

This book is a fine introduction to both the themes of Romeo and Juliet and to the wartime story of Japanese Canadians.

 

Review by Shelley Fralic in The Vancouver Sun

Perhaps one of the greatest compliments for Kluckner’s latest venture came during the book’s launch at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby when an elderly Japanese woman told him that Toshiko “brought back memories and was true to the period.”

 

Review by Phyllis Reeve in The Ormsby Review

Toshiko raises questions, suggestions, hints, with undertones complicated enough to lead to some serious thinking and more reading.

Toshiko is a coming-of-age novel that engages with the characters and draws the reader into a compelling story line. That the story is part of a larger and true story does nothing to lessen enjoyment of the “romance.”