Janice Page presents "Year of the Water Horse"

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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 the 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. She has also been on staff at The Los Angeles Times 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 INTERLOCUTORS

Meredith Goldstein is an associate editor at The Boston Globe, where she writes an advice column and hosts the Love Letters narrative relationship podcast. She is also the author of the young adult novels Things That Grow and Chemistry Lessons; the memoir Can’t Help Myself: Lessons and Confessions From a Modern Advice Columnist; and The Singles, a novel about a wedding. Meredith’s longtime Globe editor was Janice Page, who put up with a ton of Meredith’s nonsense before leaving for The Washington Post, and eventually writing a beautiful book.

Beth Teitell has been writing features for the Boston Globe since 2007, and joined the staff in 2010. Her beat is “human behavior,” and she is known for writing with a sense of humor, and for exploring the emotional angles of things that wouldn’t seem to have an emotional angle. She is the author of two books, From Here to Maternity: The Education of a Rookie Mom and Drinking Problems at the Fountain of Youth, an exploration of our society’s obsession with looking forever young. In addition to her printed work, for years she delivered humorous commentaries on public radio’s popular Marketplace program.

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