SOURCE: "Love finds a way in a sad, future L.A.," in Chicago Tribune, August 30, 1992, Sec 14, p. 7.

In the following review, Idema writes that Kadohata's depiction of a disintegrating 2052 Los Angeles in her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is convincing and likens the main protagonist Francie to Holden Caulfield.

Contrary to George Orwell's vision 35 years previous, 1984 turned out to be not such a bad year. Upon reading In the Heart of the Valley of Love, one hopes that novelist Cynthia Kadohata is even less prescient about 2052 and the world as it is observed that year by her heroine, a 19-year-old Japanese-American orphan living in Los Angeles. But don't count on it. Kadohata's projection of an exhausted planet is all too convincing.

Here is Francie recalling the scene in Chicago, where she lived when she was 12 and she and her friends "were very afraid of...