Year of the Water Horse

A Memoir

Janice Page

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 very different 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 over generations has caused much heartbreak.

And then there is the large Chinese family of Janice’s husband, James, equally cinematic and sweeping with a rich, complicated history of its own. There is a daring escape from war zones, a lost child, immigration to a new world, and a bittersweet reunion after decades of separation.

Janice met James fresh out of college while waitressing part time at Mandarin Garden, that only Chinese restaurant of its kind in Braintree. He had just arrived in America from Taiwan. The two work to bridge the divide between them—emotionally, culturally, and geographically—as they build their lives together. From Taiwan to Los Angeles, from her mother's bipolar disorder to a 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. When she and James adopt a baby girl from James’s ancestral region of China, the two close a circle that had been open for generations on both sides, finding 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.

Janice Page is 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 and Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice and multiple championship sports books on the Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox, and Bruins. She has also been on staff at The Los Angeles Times, The Providence Journal-Bulletin 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.

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