Author Event! Janice Page's "Year of the Water Horse"

Join us on April 11th at 4pm as we host Janice Page in conversation with M.J. Andersen to discuss her new memoir, Year of the Water Horse. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase!

About the Book:

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE

A warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two disparate yet connected families.

Janice Page hails from Braintree, Massachusetts and a large Catholic brood. Her parents had a complicated marriage. Her five siblings each have their own sagas, and there is a destructive genetic force within the family’s blood lines that causes much heartbreak.

And then there is the large Chinese family of Janice’s husband, James, equally cinematic and sweeping with a rich and complex history of its own. There is a daring wartime escape, a lost child, immigration to a new world, and a bittersweet reunion after decades of separation.

Janice first met James fresh out of college while waitressing at Mandarin Garden, the only Chinese restaurant of its kind in Braintree. He had just arrived in America from Taiwan. As they work to bridge the divide between them—emotionally, culturally, and geographically—they begin to build their lives together. From Taiwan to Los Angeles, from her mother's bipolar disorder to the language barrier with her mother-in-law, Janice finds herself constantly searching for the feeling of home. Janice believes she can close the circle when she embarks on her own journey to become a mother. Like so many journeys, Janice’s own journey to motherhood is filled with twists, turns, and surprises, leading to a baby girl from James’s ancestral region of China. Janice and James might finally close a circle that had been open for generations on both sides and find home at last.

Filled with humor and heart, wisdom and healing, Year of the Water Horse is a profound and compelling story with a deeply satisfying ending that will resonate long after the final page.

About the Author:

Janice Page is arts editor at The Washington Post. Prior to that, Page worked at The Boston Globe, where she also published books in partnership with the Globe, including the New York Times best-sellers Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy and Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice and multiple championship sports books on the Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox, and Bruins. She has also been on staff at The Los Angeles Times, The Providence Journal-Bulletin and written for The New York Times and Newsweek/MSNBC. A Boston-area native, Janice graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude from Rutgers University and was named the 2023 recipient of the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo, where she worked on Year of the Water Horse.

About the Moderator:

M.J. Andersen is the author of a memoir, Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner. She was employed for more than three decades by The Providence Journal, where she wrote for the editorial pages. For five years, she contributed a books column to the Boston Globe. Her art reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

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