Supersonic: A Novel

by Thomas Kohnstamm

Overview

“Masterfully rendered and mercilessly readable. Kohnstamm populates these pages with insight, hilarity, emotion, and unforgettable characters. Supersonic is a novel with so much narrative propulsion that it manages to live up to its name.” —Jonathan Evison, author of Small World and Lawn Boy

When PTA president Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth petitions to rename a Seattle elementary school after her late grandmother, she ignites a battle over the school’s future and the history of its surrounding neighborhood. Supersonic launches readers into a kaleidoscopic tale of the generations of interrelated families who breathed life into that small, hilltop community.

The story cuts in time from the arrival of white settlers’ ships to the last indigenous landowner fighting to hold on to scraps of his ancestral home and back to the school’s PTA auction. It interweaves an opioid-addicted nineteenth-century con man–cum–civic booster, a disgraced Navy seaman building an airplane that travels faster than sound, a stay-at-home dad hustling to open the city’s first legal weed shop and Sami’s grandmother, a survivor of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, who founded the school’s once-celebrated music program.

The novel traces their false starts, triumphs, and heartbreaks through the booms and busts of the Yukon gold rush, the jet age, Big Tech, and beyond. By exploring the converging and often clashing personalities that make up the dynamic soul of a place, Supersonic illuminates themes of identity, displacement, destruction, and reinvention that give rise to all great American cities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640096813
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	378,197
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.54(h) x 1.22(d)

About the Author

THOMAS KOHNSTAMM was born and raised in Seattle and still lives in the same house he grew up in—now with his wife and two children. He’s a career-long freelance writer and has run his own video and animation studio for over a decade. Supersonic is his third book.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/20/2025

Kohnstamm (Lake City) serves up a splendid, centuries-spanning tale of Indigenous and colonial history in the Pacific Northwest. In 1856, Duwamish chief Si’sia vows to protect sacred land near Seattle from violent white settlers, some of whom are named Stevenson and Stalworth. In 1971, Si’sia’s descendant Larry Dugdale works as a machinist on the prototype of a supersonic jet. Larry is in love with Ruth Hasegawa, whose immigrant ancestors once worked, and then owned, Si’sia’s land. Ruth’s mother, Masako, a Japanese internment camp survivor who established the music program at Stevenson Elementary School, controls Ruth’s every move in an ill-fated attempt to arrange a better life for her. Kohnstamm alternates Larry’s narrative with that of Ruth’s daughter, Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth, who in 2014 spearheads a push to rename the elementary school after her mother, only to be told that the school may have to close. The interconnectedness of the cast creates an addictive narrative tension, and Kohnstamm’s character work is top notch, particularly with the tragic Larry, whose earnest and increasingly drastic actions follow one misfortune after another. Readers shouldn’t miss Kohnstamm’s heartbreaking saga. Agent: Jennie Dunham, Dunham Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Supersonic operates as literary novels are meant to: it offers characters on both sides of a divide and allows the reader to design their own rooting interests." —Eric Olson, The Seattle Times

"The book is fiction, but it reflects the very real ethos of a city constantly reinventing itself through boom and bust cycles across generations." —Hans Anderson, KUOW-FM

"Thomas Kohnstamm will own it: He set out to write nothing less than The Great Seattle Novel. And in Supersonic, the 49-year-old Seattle native might have done just that, if only in its unprecedented sweep and scope." —Jim Thomsen, Post Alley Seattle

"The dialogue frequently sings and is generously punctuated with clever wit . . . Kohnstamm’s remarkable achievement is to so effectively address race, class, culture, identity, and power in such a compelling, entertaining read." —Booklist (starred review)

"Kohnstamm serves up a splendid, centuries-spanning tale of Indigenous and colonial history in the Pacific Northwest . . . The interconnectedness of the cast creates an addictive narrative tension, and Kohnstamm’s character work is top notch . . . Readers shouldn’t miss Kohnstamm’s heartbreaking saga." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The Great Seattle novel has arrived." ––Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

“On the soul-of-the-city level, this is the best of all the Seattle books I know of. Supersonic is a huge achievement” —Fred Moody, author of Seattle and the Demons of Ambition

“Supersonic exquisitely depicts intergenerational resilience and the human cost of progress. Heartbreaking, hilarious, incisive, and deeply relevant, Kohnstamm deftly interrogates the aspirations of a city vying for world-class status.” —Cynthia Brothers, founder Vanishing Seattle

“A dazzling, expansive new vision of the West, Supersonic is both sweeping and intimate, spanning more than a hundred years on the land now known as Seattle and recasting westward expansion through the eyes of a vivid, indelible array of characters." —Maxim Loskutoff, author of Old King

“Evocative of Richard Powers and Maria Semple in its scope, empathy, and humor, Kohnstamm's gift for distinct and unerring characterizations make Supersonic a truly epic novel of its place and time." —J. Ryan Stradal, author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

“Masterfully rendered, and mercilessly readable. Kohnstamm populates these pages with insight, hilarity, emotion, and unforgettable characters. Supersonic is a novel with so much narrative propulsion that it manages to live up to its name.” —Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy

From the Publisher

2024-11-09
Three generations of Seattle women navigate bigotry, politics, and scheming men.

Kohnstamm’s second novel opens with a setup that at first seems too thin to carry even a short story: In 2014, Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth has volunteered to run her children’s elementary school PTA in hopes of renaming the school after her grandmother, Masako Hasegawa, a victim of Japanese American internment and a longtime music teacher there. But that small effort turns out to unlock a host of complications. It evokes the history of the school’s original namesake, an East Coast settler who scammed the native tribes in the 1850s. It implicates an effort by another local, Bruce Jorgensen, to convert a nearby property into a pot dispensary—if only he can game the license-lottery system in his favor. It harks back to Sami’s mother, Ruth Hasegawa, who endured Masako’s strict upbringing in the 1970s even while pursuing a romance with Larry Dugdale, a ne’er-do-well who’s pinned his future on a local aerospace company’s plan to manufacture a fleet of supersonic passenger jets. And naturally, it goes all the way back to Masako herself, a passionate music teacher. Bouncing from the middle of the 19th century to the present day, Kohnstamm capably occupies the dynamic of characters in multiple eras while spotlighting commonalities—most prominently the complex (sometimes bigoted) bureaucracies of the city, and the stumblebum manner of men and get-rich-quick ideas. But Kohnstamm seems to be shooting for an epic scope that the novel never quite achieves, as it’s generally stuck in the middle gear of chronicling sputtering relationships. That means some late-breaking dramas involving marriage, mental illness, and an attempted plane hijacking feel less persuasive. As a series of individual domestic dramas, it has liveliness and ironic humor. But its parts are less than its whole.

A family saga whose execution doesn’t quite match its ambition.

Kirkus Reviews