CAROL ROH
SPAULDING
Eludia Award Winner from Hidden River Arts
Sowilo Press
Daughter of a Collaborationist. Housekeeper to Gertrude Stein. An ordinary woman lives through extraordinary times.
“In Spaulding’s intricate debut novel Helen Button, she deftly weaves a dual narrative timeline echoing between dangerous Vichy France during WWII and political upheaval in modern day Paris to tell an atmospheric tale of love and loss, war and death, across multiple generations. A tour de force of extraordinary historical detail, fresh perspectives on well-known figures like Gertrude Stein, and
Reluctant newcomers to the village of Bilignin, France, young siblings Hélène and Guillaume Bouton befriend their eccentric neighbors Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Dubbed “Helen Button” by Stein because she is half-American, Hélène — the stepdaughter of a French Vichy officer — grows up in a tense climate of advancing war. To escape her fretful alcoholic mother and oppressive household, she takes a position as a bonne femme (housekeeper) for Stein and Toklas. When a careless remark by Stein seems to doom a young Jewish boy brought into safety by the Resistance, Hélène’s friendship with the couple becomes strained. One night near the war’s end, Hélène has the chance to intercept a planned attack that could save the boy’s life. Instead, the consequences of that fateful night will take Hélène a lifetime to face down.
exquisite, lyrical writing, Helen Button is a beautiful examination of fate, survival, and how harrowing moral choices in wartime can have far-reaching effects. The story of Hélène Bouton will stay with me for a long time.”
—Kali White VanBaale, author of The Monsters We Make and The Good Divide
“Spaulding-Kruse’s Helen Button is a carefully crafted, compelling narrative…. that illuminates little known aspects of World War Two while also drawing parallels with political crises in postcolonial France. Told through the point of view of Hélène, the imagined French-American housekeeper of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the narrative focuses on the plight of children during wartime as well as during times of social and political unrest.
—Kathleen Renk, author of The Rosetti Diaries
"Those of us who love France will find this delightful and moving novel especially meaningful. By shedding light on the troubling chapters of France’s past and the challenging realities of its present, Carol Roh Spaulding deepens and complicates our understanding of the country. After all, no object of our affection is perfect—it’s through knowing the flaws that our love becomes more honest."
—Wini Moranville, author of Everyday French Cooking: Modern French Cuisine Made Simple, and the memoir, Love Is My Favorite Flavor
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction
(University of Georgia Press, September 2023)
SF Chronicle
Stories that reside in the tension between what it means to be Asian and American.
"Every page not only delights and instructs but also provokes and moves us, lingering like a remembered dream."
—JOAN FRANK, San Francisco Chronicle
"The scope of these stories is as immense as their renderings are masterful. More than a mere family saga, the collection testifies to the history of anti-Asian racism and immigration policy in the U.S. and to the powers of family, place, belonging, and identity."
—JODY HOBBS HESLER, Necessary Fiction
“To call Waiting for Mr. Kim a collection doesn’t do it justice; each gem of a story stands alone, the cumulative heft of the characters (including a ghost) spanning the long sweep of the diasporic experience of one family is as satisfying and epic as a multivolume novel.”
—MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE, author of The Evening Hero
"Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories, Carol Roh Spaulding’s uniquely linked collection of stories and one novella, follows three generations of the Song family, beginning with the family’s emigration from Korea to California shortly before the 1924 Immigration Act. Decade by decade, with shifting perspectives, Waiting for Mr. Kim lays out what it means to be a daughter and what it means to be a mother, what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be an Asian American woman in this country. The reader first meets Grace—whose perspective threads through many of the stories—via her older sister, a ghost narrator who died tragically and whose death haunts these stories. In the novella that ends the collection, Grace is a grandmother caring for the son of her estranged daughter and is also an older woman embracing desire and love. Roh Spaulding’s prose is gorgeous and lyrical, at other times quiet and restrained, always beautifully precise.Waiting for Mr. Kim is the collection that we have been waiting for, whether we knew it or not.”
—LORI OSTLUND, Series Editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction
"Roh Spaulding's stories draw you in so close you feel them fluttering at your core, where they haunt you and crack you open. With poetic prose clear as mountain water, each character offers brutally honest explorations of how the past steers your future. Whether shouldering the burdens of shifting cultures, lingering poverty, or offering clear-eyed truths of what it means to be a woman in the world with the pressure of conforming bearing down, each page shines with grit and grace. Not since reading Joan Silber’s Improvement and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Water Museum, have I been ushered so completely over the invisible bridges between two countries. I’m left in awe of this wise and vital collection."
—DEVIN MURPHY, author of The Boat Runner
"This is an absolutely lovely book—quietly affecting, crystalline stories that build in radiance and astonishing power. Waiting for Mr. Kim is a wondrous achievement."
—DON LEE, author of Yellow and The Partition
