The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

The Buddha in the Attic was published by one of the six--excuse me-- one of the five (as of yesterday) publishing conglomerates doing business in the United States, and that company is Random House.  (Penguin merged with Random House, by the way.)  I mention this because, as many of you know,  I review self-published books, and I didn't want anyone to mistake this for an indie book.  As an indie/self-published book this wouldn't have gotten much attention because it is closer to poetry than prose, doesn't have much character development, doesn't have individual characters whom we get to know well at all, and it doesn't have scenes with dialogue.  Oh yes, and it would be accurate to say that this book asks many questions and is repetitive.  But this isn't a self-published book and was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction.

So I asked myself a few questions when I finished reading it:

Did I want to keep reading?  Yes

Did I care about the characters?  Not in the sense that I was concerned about a particular outcome or about what happened to any individual character.

Why did I keep reading?  I enjoyed the flow of the words, the rhythm of the sentences.  I didn't keep reading because I wondered what happens next or wondered what's going to happen to that character.

Did it feel like a story?  It felt like a story the way history feels like a story.  It didn't feel like fiction. I wasn't getting caught up in a fictional world with specific characters and their very specific problems.  This was history (which is a story) told in poetry.

Was this a novel?  Ah, that's a good question.  To say something is a novel creates certain expectations, and this book definitely deviates from those expectations of what a novel is.  I didn't get emotionally involved in the characters' lives like I like to do in novels.  I didn't know any of the characters except in a collective sense, and there was a detached feeling, a distance that prevented me from getting close.

If you enjoy poetry and are interested in the time in history when Japanese women went to the United States as mail order, or picture, brides-- then you might want to give this book a try!