Kintsugi: The Gold - Book Two

Some things aren't meant to stay broken. Some people aren't meant to stay apart.

Book Two of the Kintsugi Series, and the repair the first book only promised.

In the Japanese art of kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired with lacquer and powdered gold. The break is not hidden. It is gilded. The mended bowl is not a return to what it was. It is something that could only exist because of the damage, and is worth more for it.

That is the whole argument of this novel, and it is a harder one than it sounds. Going back is not available to them. Something new has to be made out of what happened.

Okinawa, Tokyo, Washington, San Francisco. A captain who has spent her whole career being the flattest voice in the room, and who wears the flight suit on purpose because she has a closet full of choices and makes the one that armors her. An heir to an old Japanese family, doing it the other way this time, in front of people who would rather he did not.

Thirty chapters in alternating close third. A professional inquiry. A grandmother's discipline and a sister who receives him the way she receives heads of state. Families on both sides with long opinions about what each of them is worth. And the woman whose betrayal he spent three years being certain about, standing across a government conference table.

This is the book where the gold goes in. Not a reset, not an apology accepted in one scene, but the slow ugly work of two people deciding that the seam is going to show and they are going to be worth more for it.

Content note, from the book's own front matter: adult contemporary romance for mature readers. Explicit, open-door love scenes; strong language; depictions of grief and loss; references to racism, family estrangement, and a professional inquiry; and the emotional aftermath of betrayal. The novel engages, with care and respect, the long histories that shape its two leads, a Black American officer and the heir to an old Japanese family, and the prejudice they meet in more than one country.

A glossary of Japanese terms appears at the back. Aishiteru, the deepest and rarest form of I love you, is one of them, and the series has been holding it since the first page of the first book.

Follows Kintsugi: The Breaking. The eight months before either book are told in Kintsugi: The Eight Months, a prequel novella, free in this store.

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