43. The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

audio read by Samantha Quan and Carrington MacDuffie

4 unabridged cds (4 hrs.)

2011, Random House Audio

144 pgs.

Adult Historical Fiction 

Finished 9/19/2013

Goodreads Rating: 3.55

My Rating: 2/ It was okay

TPPL

Setting: mid-California/San Francisco area from the 1920s to mid-1940

My comments:  I just can't consider this a novel - it's more like a very well-researched piece of nonfictiom presented in a way that people who don't really like nonfiction (me) can find it a little more palatable.  Immediately apparent is the use of "we" instead of "I," which took a bit of getting used to until you figured out she was never talking about one person, but a group of women who all had different experiences.  Beautiful writing, but it really got on my nerves after awhile. List after list after list... It was a decent way to get information about Japanese pre-war brides and a taste of what it might have been like to be sent to Japanese interment camps in the US, but I would have so much preferred individual stories of a handful of these woman.  I'm a story/plot/character person and although this was original and different, I can't, personally, recommend it as a piece of fiction....

Goodreads Review:  Julie Otsuka’s long-awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the picture brides’ extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.