Supersonic: A Novel

by Thomas Kohnstamm

“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 Japanese internment survivor 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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

1 pages, Audio CD

Published February 25, 2025

About the author

New novel, LAKE CITY, out January 2019 on Counterpoint Press.

Reviews

[Gwyneth Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Supersonic… more like midsonic. This novel is hard to summarize, but it focuses on an elementary school in Seattle on the brink of shutting down and the efforts to rename it. Kohnstamm uses this situation as a launching pad to explore topics like heritage, technological development, internment camps, wealth disparity, privilege, etc. It’s a lot, but Kohnstamm successfully paints a nuanced picture of Seattle throughout its many stages through time jumps and multiple points of view.

While this started off strong for me, I lost steam about 2/3rds of the way through. My main issue with this book was Bruce. I am a fan of flawed characters, sure. But Bruce? I would fight Bruce on the street if I saw him and spit on him. I think Bruce was supposed to come off as somewhat likable and quirky, but he made my blood boil and we had to hear from him allllll the time. I am SICK of characters that are neglectful parents and partners, then they make one grand gesture and suddenly everyone forgives them. “That’s just Bruce being Bruce!” NO! He should be better!

Without him, I would’ve given this a 4/5, but it’s a 3/5. Fuck you Bruce

[Melissa Levis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you SO much Counterpoint Press for sending me this gifted early copy of Supersonic by Thomas Kohnstamm.. I am so happy to have had this opportunity, this book was excellent.

What you’ll get:
A multi POV book with timelines and characters that seem completely unrelated- BUT IT ALL WORKS!
Historical fiction
Family saga
Likeable and/or relatable characters. Kohnstamm does a great job developing them all.
Smart humor
Kind of long - but worth it

Supersonic is a great work of character-driven historical fiction that is told during a few windows of time. This mosaic-style multi-POV novel kicks off in the 1800s and sets the scene for generations to come in the Pacific Northwest area. The story weaves in a young woman and her strict mom in the 1970s, a “slacker,” who is working his damndest to open a legal pot dispensary and a PTA mom. There are rich and interesting characters found throughout. They’re well developed and I feel they get the treatment they deserve. Their often ordinary life challenges are treated with beauty and are lovely to read about. When I first read the description of the book I thought “how will this all work?” Trust me, it works out great. It’s entertaining and laced with great humor along the way.

Yes, there’s a lot going on in this book. But Kohnstamm is a pro at keeping it all straight, organized and together. Yes you’ll scratch your head - but it truly all works and part of the satisfying journey of reading this book.

There’s an important character, Larry in the 1970’s. He’s probably my favorite. If you read this one, you’ll have to let me know yours.

My favorite quote was about a character in the early timeline, “You’re a wonderful manipulator of the press. A downright master of the dark arts” (slight paraphrase there.) A statement like this just seems so fitting about so many today. I’m probably going to start referring to people as “masters of the dark arts” in my everyday vernacular!

My quick take: Super enjoyable. A fulfilling story about rich characters.

[Laura Donovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so clever, so timely, so ambitious, so eye-opening about the destruction of a community. There are lots of laughs but some dark points as well. The author captures what it means to feel lost mid-life and grasp at hope in whatever way possible. I related to Loose Bruce, who is disappointed by the turn his life has taken. I also identified with Ruth, who needs to break away from her mother but doesn’t know how to go confidently into the world. This novel is a tribute to people born during the wrong era, as well as a story about deep rooted racism in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a complicated story that comes together beautifully in the end. A slow burn, a tragic predicament befalling a bleak school.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this historical fiction book from Counterpoint Press and Goodreads. These well developed characters are part of a hill top community, each navigating the changing world around them with humor, frustration, and perserverance.

In 2014, Sami is attempting to save the local elementary school and name it for the grandmother who raised her. Stay-at-home Dad, Bruce, assists her while planning his "next big thing."
In 1971, Ruth is avoiding her mother's matchmaking and intrigued by Larry, who owns a motorcycle, smokes, and works at the Supersonic jet plant.
In 1958, Masako teaches music at the elementary school, while facing scrutiny from the white community. Surviving the internment camp has given her strength.
It all began in 1856, when the "Bostons" arrived in Washington State and massacred the local tribe. Young Si'sia will stay on his land.

[Olivia Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent story of Seattle, but might have been better as a short series. There are lots of interesting twists and connections that deserve more writing. While most is very well-researched, the part about the mayoral candidate does not really fit Seattle politics of 2014.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I crossed the finish line of this novel, my immediate thought - which had been simmering for some time - was that the novel tried to accomplish too much and became overwhelmed by the grandiosity of its endeavor. I suspect that many readers will delight in the complexity of timelines and characters. I think I, however, have grown tired of what seems to be a popular trend in novel format, whereby authors lay out generations of characters that ebb and flow through periods of connectivity. There certainly were characters with whom I felt more well-developed, but - on balance - the novel often felt busy.

[Ariel Basom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Supersonic by Thomas Kohnstamm: a Master Class in Story Braiding
Reviewed by: Ariel Basom


Thomas Kohnstamm, in his Seattle based family saga, Supersonic (Counterpoint Press, 2025) has written a book that spans that little strip of rain soaked land between the Puget Sound and Lake Washington as well as multiple generations of Seattleites going all the way back to the white settlers, known as Bostons, pushing the Duwamish out of the region and ushering in the boom era of the Alaska gold rush. Populated with a diverse cast of flawed humans, Kohnstamm portrays Seattle through the centuries all the while remaining focused on a single immovable rock. The huge rock seems to anchor myriad stories like a hair clip in this braided narrative. It is at the center of a dying elementary school; the cornerstone of a land dispute; in the middle of the fight to be on the winning end of the legalization of marijuana; instrumental in a love story that follows the tragic trajectory of the Supersonic Boeing jet that lent its name to the NBA team Seattleites now know as Oklahoma City Thunder. The rock perseveres through everything—all the while serving as an era busting resting place and toilet for a long line of local seagulls.

Supersonic (released in paperback February, 2026) is a vastly varied narrative told from multiple third person perspectives, on five different timelines, in three different centuries. It is a clinic in braiding stories and times together and, from a writer's perspective, a learning opportunity on how to do so. Begging comparisons to iconic classics like Steinbeck's East of Eden and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Supersonic may do for Seattle what these other novels did for Salinas Valley and Mississippi, respectively. That is to say—immortalize it. Supersonic, however, does not claim to draw from the bible, nor does it attempt to drag a dead matriarch across the state. It does, however, manage to tell a single story of place while brutalizing its many protagonists. Only time will tell if Supersonic defines the city as artfully as the city defines the book; anybody looking to write a similar work should pick this one up as a study, perhaps alongside the afore mentioned classics, to see how it was done by the greats and to see how it can still be done in our contemporary time.

It would be hard to point to a single character in Supersonic that one could call the central character, but an argument could be made for Larry who seems to be at the nexus of the braid; the one strand that acts as the connective tissue to everyone else. It seems a story of this complexity would need this. In East of Eden, it's Adam; in As I Lay Dying it has to be Daryl. Even an artfully woven novel that goes in so many directions has to have this one character without whom the varied narratives might fall apart. Larry, a young and insecure man in the 1970s, follows a complicated arc that sees him always teetering on the verge between triumph and disaster. Like Adam, he is lovable despite his obvious flaws; like Daryl he is driven despite his apparent lack of ambition and, it is through the lens of Larry's unlikely journey that Supersonic must be read as he is a mirror to the constant disappointments of the land itself which, to the Bostons and so many since, holds so much promise and so much tragedy.

In another Steinbeck book, Travels with Charley, Seattle was teeming with "frantic growth ... bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning." Steinbeck viewed Seattle as a place of change and it is this Seattle that Kohnstamm finds in Supersonic, a Seattle that never settles, a Seattle that burns—literally for one character who views it from beside the immovable rock, his Duwamish heart filled with hope—figuratively for something better; something to call one's own; something to call one's home. Kohnstamm writes of a Seattle that can't know itself or be itself because it can never stop changing long enough to find itself and the characters who populate it, especially in and around this rock, burn for something better, too, each of them deeply human in their desires; each of them doing their best despite themselves.

Any writer interested in deepening their understanding of how to write complex humans and a diverse cast should look no further than Supersonic. It is so common, these days, to feel uncomfortable or deterred from writing characters that don't look like ourselves. Thomas, seemingly a white male, does this artfully treating each person, whether they be Native American, Asian, Black, White, male, female, or otherwise, with reverence, humility, and humanity. This, after all, is what bonds the diverse cast, that ever pressing need to be more human, to feel deeply, to connect to one another.

Despite the sometimes heavy subject matter Supersonic addresses: school closures; intergenerational trauma; addiction, the book maintains a kind of levity and humor. It is with this light touch and grace that Kohnstamm shines most of all. He is able to deliver a story that has deep significance, all the while maintaining access to the oddities, frivolities, and laughable flaws of not only the population but also the city itself. He brings to life an array of humans who struggle to be righteous even when they might not really want to be, sometimes with very good reason and very clear motivation.


Supersonic by Thomas Kohnstamm (Counterpoint Press, 2025; paperback released February 2026)

[Shelley Ettinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 really. This is a lovely book, just not knock-my-socks-off level so it falls short of five stars. But it's very good. By my standard measure--did it make me both think and feel--it earns a big thumbs up. It had me in tears at the end, which speaks to Kohnstamm's skill in weaving together a big story over the span of more than a century with well-drawn believable individual characters. By the end he's done a splendid job of pulling it all together, saying something about history and something about humanity.

My quibble is one of my usual ones: a fair number of anachronisms in language, not enough to ruin the book by any means, but enough to be a bit annoying. I so so wish younger authors would do a better job at researching what language their characters would use in various eras. Two examples to boot. (1) While the expression "he couldn't care less" has unfortunately in the last decade or so morphed into the horrible "he could care less," which means the opposite, it most definitely was not "could" rather than "couldn't" back in the ate 19th century. When a character said or thought that he "could care less" in a late 1890s scene, it made me roll my eyes. (2) Among the several more anachronisms in the 1971 sections are the use of "senior" instead of "senior citizen" when the former shorthand was not yet in use then; the use of "dude" when this now ubiquitous annoyance was nowhere near ubiquitous back then; the use of the word "optics" which, though it's become as irritatingly normalized as dude, this only happened over the last decade, two at the most. Before that the word "image" or "appearance" would have been used.

It's a terrible habit of mine to spend many sentences on minor criticisms, especially with a book like this that deserves a lot of praise. So let me end by reiterating that this is a very fine novel, an important novel even, a bighearted novel, a novel that left me in tears, left me feeling and thinking, which is my nearly highest level of praise. It didn't blow my mind but it very much touched my heart.

[Shaun McMichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intergenerational saga intertwining five families with indelible cords of ambition, place, and hopeless love, SUPERSONIC tells the story of the forces deciding who gets to name what, who gets to live where, and who gets remembered and forgotten.

Cycling between the late 1800s/early 1900s, the late ‘50s, the early ‘70s, and 2014, the work’s breadth of scope becomes focused on its characters’ incarnated realities. Siab (Indian Sam), rare survivor of the Duwamish resistance to the colonizers, becomes the lone Native land holder who must fend off the predations of the burgeoning white population. Young widow turned intrepid music teacher, Masako Hasegawa must navigate hostile white hegemony while maintaining high standards for her daughter and her own integrity as a musician. PTA Pro and mother of four, Sami is on a quest to rename the neighborhood elementary school to honor her grandmother. Grunt-level plane mechanic Larry Dugdale nurses delusions of grandeur, hoping to usher in a new era for his city by working on the Supersonic jet; meanwhile his love-interest, Ruth, has to squirm free from her domineering mother’s stifling expectations for her future, even as she endures Larry’s increasingly unhinged grasp on reality.

If these intricate story lines and compelling characters weren’t enough of a reason to read SUPERSONIC, Kohnstamm’s layering of images (seagulls, a bolder, and the bones beneath which our metropolises and schools are built) is carried on the light sails of his prose, with wit and insight landing every time right between a reader's breast bones just enough to nick their heart while making them laugh. With the opening and closing pages achieving near mathematical mirroring of each other, the novel is a master class in the craft of pacing and interweaving of motif, achieving tragedy and comedy of the highest caliber sublime. In Kohnstamm’s unnamed Seattle-esque metropolis, his core characters find acceptance in the face of catastrophe and disappointment, learning to appreciate the wheeling gulls even while getting blasted by the bird shit.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically loved this. Kind of reminded me of Holes, but written for adults. Curses and recurring motifs and generations of connected families all in one place.

The one criticism I have is that some of the dialogue is a little odd, mostly in the tendency of multiple characters to leave the subjects out of their sentences when speaking, which isn't something people do here--for example, if I wanted to say "I am going to the store," I'd say "I'M going" not "AM going." The latter is something I've certainly seen people do in texts and emails, but not while speaking. If there was only one character who did this (for example, Kim, with her ultra-optimized tech-babble personality), that wouldn't be an issue. But when it's multiple characters, it rings a bit false.

[Mario Mirabelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well crafted story and history of a small piece of what I would expect to be Seattle. The main character is Sami, a local with very deep local roots, four children, a sort of understanding husband, and one final thrust to make a difference as the head of the local elementary school PTA. Sami swore she would never get involved again with the PTA, but with her last child and in search of honoring her grandmother, she dives in. Unfortunately, life is not perfect just like the past. This story does an excellent job of moving between various time periods and still manages to get to today. Well done. FYI, soften your picture tough guy.

[Meepspeeps · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sharp-witted read with complex characters and caricatures across several generations, which I had to record separately to keep straight. It occasionally bogs down and presents many sad situations, but quickly ramps up again to delight the reader. I laughed out loud several times. I recommend it to adults: brief descriptions of sexual activity, extensive drug use, and suicide.

[Joseph Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great cast of characters! This story sounds familiar, having grown up in the PNW. I would liken the book to Michener's Chesapeake. Having multi-generational stories in the same location spanning hundreds of years. There are good times and bad times. People with good intention and those without. Kohnstamm writes with good humor and even made me weepy. Bravo!! Can't wait for the next one.

[Aileen Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. I really, really tried. A book about Seattle? Yes! A story about Boeing and the development of a Supersonic Jet. Yes! I only made it 30% through, even after a second attempt. Very disappointing. I see this author has another book set in Seattle. Normally I would read that too, but will not bother based on my experience with this book. But still, #BringBackTheSonics

[Barry Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a native of the northwest and resident of Seattle, this novel captures a cast of characters that comically reflect the region and historical settings. The struggles are universal, but this story made me ponder what events defined the makeup of a northwest native.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting novel set in Seattle. The story touches on a little bit of everything Seattle: the First Nations, internment of US citizens of Japanese descent during WWII, Boeing, Microsoft, interracial marriage, the legalization of marijuana, etc.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that will haunt me for awhile…in a good way. Great dialog, absolutely plausible plot lines, relatable, endearing characters, and seamless connections across hundreds of years. Really an extraordinary work of fiction.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars… maybe 3?

I absolutely love stories set in Seattle. A lot of potential but fell short for me. So many characters, jumping through time, a wide variety of topics… loved the last third of the story though!

[Vivek R · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed Kohnstamm's humor, characters and storytelling. Great read!

[Mike Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book... and it was fun having Seattle as the background of the story.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing novel from Thomas Kohnstamm. His best one yet. Filled with nuanced yet relatable characters and a beautiful arc. I loved every page.

[Kristin Rademacher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really did not enjoy this book. It is sad and depressing. The storyline is hard to follow, especially in the beginning.

[Diane Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wandered through this book. Lots going on, some interesting characters…it took me awhile to get in to it.

[Dianna D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was f’ing tragic.




I loved it.

[Steve Malone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mixed reviews. Normally I really don't like a book that jumps back and forth over many years/decades following characters that only later are revealed to be connected. Also, some of the characters are very stereotypical; the noble indigenous man who has lost almost everything to the greed of the white man, the over protective asian mother whose daughter rebels and gets into trouble, the slightly mentally ill homeless type who is very good hearted but screws up everything he tries. Despite all of these obvious "losers" the book holds together telling a compelling story. In particular the dialog is very well done; one can even almost identify with some of the characters and feel sympathy for their plight even if their mistakes are totally obvious.

[Alexandria Thibert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was great saga that followed generations of different families in Seattle and their different experiences of the city's history. I really appreciated the way it showed how indigenous land theft, Japanese American incarceration, and segregation weren't that long ago and continue to affect people in the present. The multi-generational kaleioscopic narrative style really helped get this point across. I also liked the twists at the end of the book, and I found the ending satisfying.

There were two problems I had with this book: First, I didn't like Bruce's character at all. I was frustrated by how sympathetically he was portrayed when he was really nothing more than a pathetic incompetent man and neglectful parent, and I'm not a fan of the trope of a large gesture repairing a broken relationship. Secondly, I didn't like the book's emphasis on symbolic actions like renaming buildings as a way to reconcile past injustices. Sure, it can promote awareness, but I believe that material reparations are far more effective at addressing the root of the issue.

[Karen Caizooka · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun read with great characters. I didn’t expect to fall so hard for these characters. I enjoyed the way in which the author artfully left the reader space to interpret the characters intentions and motivations. This method lent itself well to a beautifully told story.