PRAISE FOR THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY
"Cheryl Ossola deftly shifts between time periods in The Wild Impossibility and presents readers with a lovely decades-long tangle to unwind, a star-crossed love affair, and courageous recovery from unbearable loss. Ms. Ossola's depiction of Japanese-American citizens imprisoned at Manzanar reminds us that prejudice and racial hatred lie just under the surface, and can lead to unspeakable harm to many, or reverberate down the generations in a single family. Highly recommended."
—Jo Ann Butler, Historical Novel Society
"How tenaciously can memories struggle to be remembered? […] History has largely forgotten what little it bothered to learn about Manzanar in the first place, so Ossola starts with a blank page and fills it beautifully with fragmented flashbacks, contemporary marital drama and dogged pursuit of family history and heartbreak that spans generations. Interestingly, [her] storytelling also takes on some of the flavor of a Japanese kaidan, or ghost story. She portrays history with an accuracy that speaks well of her journalistic background, but she also understands the kaidan approach that a ghost story need not equate to a horror story. What better way to relive the disappeared past […]."
—Richard Imamura, screenwriter of The Manzanar Fishing Club
"Ossola walks a wonderful wire here, sculpting a story that's readable and timely. The novel honors its history with austere accuracy, and Ossola captures her characters' complex emotional trajectories in gusts of poetry."
—Joshua Mohr, author of All This Life, Model Citizen, Saint the Terrifying, and The Wolf Wants Answers
"The Wild Impossibility dazzles on every page, with its wonderfully rich prose and layered story. Cheryl Ossola goes many levels below the surface, showing how a present life is infused with the past, how hearts are broken and mended, how at some level, there is no such thing as a past or present at all. It's a novel that will have its way with you because Ossola is such an accomplished writer."
—Nina Schuyler, author of Afterword, In This Ravishing World, and The Translator
"The Wild Impossibility is a breathtaking novel about what it means to be a mother. Cheryl Ossola is a fearless writer, and she has constructed a tale that goes back and forth between time periods with the utmost skill. Prepare to have your heart wrenched by this beautiful page-turner!"
—Katie Crouch, New York Times best-selling author of Girls in Trucks and Embassy Wife
"The Wild Impossibility is the kind of fiction that captures the past in all its ache and cruelty such that I don't just believe something like this story happened; I almost come to believe that this exact story happened. It is a remarkable achievement to bring history screaming through the morning into high-noon for new reckoning. Unfortunately, our country's political moment makes this not so much cautionary as it is a reminder that history rhymes with itself."
—Michael Prihoda, After the Pause
"The Wild Impossibility weaves together multi-generational, multicultural love stories that bear timely witness to our depths and heights as people, as nations, and invites us to ponder what's possible in ways crushing and uplifting. Sensual. Heartful."
—Ethel Rohan, author of The Weight of Him and Sing, I
"In lyric prose Cheryl Ossola takes us on an exhilarating journey, as Kira Esposito becomes a relentless detective of her dreams in a search for origins. Readers will time-travel on switchback trails, from Kira's 21st-century life with her husband to a Japanese interment camp in the 1940s—and back again. Ossola's stunning descriptions of the landscape ground us in a vivid a sense of place and the porous boundaries between time-realms create engrossing tensions in Kira's marriage. Ossola is masterful at showing the connection between dreams, quantum labyrinths, and daily life. By the end of this book you will be a seasoned time-traveler."
—Thaisa Frank, author of Enchantment and Heidegger's Glasses