I had never heard of this book. It popped up in one of my “What’s Available Now” searches on my library’s eBook site. I was going to use this as my “Cover Art” Bingo square, because I loved the cover and that’s a big part of why I picked it, but then I found out it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and so I’m using it for “Snubbed,” because this book should have one at least one […]
Spoiled by its ending
Ruth is a Novelist with writer’s block living on a Canadian island with her husband Oliver. One day a mysterious diary washes up on the shore, a diary from a Japanese school girl called Nao. Nao is obsessed with time and she explores this as she writes in her journal, attempting to capture her grandmother’s story. It is to be the last thing Nao does before she leaves this place, suicide runs in the family you see. Ruth starts reading this journal and becomes absorbed […]
Suicidal Tendencies
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being is two stories in one, or rather one story within another. Nao Yasutani, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Japan in the early 2000s, is writing a diary where she intends to tell the story of her 104-yr-old great grandmother Jiko and her life as a Buddhist nun. What she ends up writing about, however, is her terrible life as a recent transplant to Japan, where she endures bullying that would make and after-school special cry. She plans […]
When a barnacle covered bag washes ashore on a small island in British Columbia, Ruth is immediately drawn into the narrative of Nao, a 16-year-old from an ocean away in Tokyo, Japan. Nao lived with her parents in California, where Silicon Valley and the California sun held nothing but hope and happiness for the Japanese family. But her father’s job loss returned Nao’s family to Japan, where she went from happy well-adjusted teenager, to a bullied outcast. Escaping the constant pinching, stalking, and even fake […]