Julie Otsuka – Cannonball Read 17

“She remembers that today is Sunday, which six days out of seven is not true.”

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

September 20, 2023 by Sophia Leave a Comment

I found The Swimmers (2022) by Julie Otsuka on NPR’s Best Books List. To be honest, I think I was specifically looking for a short, but good, book and The Swimmers fit the bill. I try to swim once in awhile, so I figured this book might even be relatable and/or motivating on that level as well. It turned out to be very different from what I expected as well as different from most novels that I’ve read. The Swimmers begins with the description of a swimming pool and the many people […]

How can a novel about dementia be beautiful?

The Swimmers: A Novel by Julie Otsuka

September 13, 2023 by ElCicco Leave a Comment

Cbr15bingo Adulthood I have reviewed Julie Otsuka’s previous two novels and loved them both. Otsuka is an amazingly talented writer. Her novels are not long; her sentences tend to be short but deliver beautiful imagery and subtle emotion. They are, as I have mentioned previously, like a pointillist painting in verbal form. Both When the Emperor Was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic, critically acclaimed winners of numerous awards, deal with Otsuka’s family history: immigration from Japan to California and the experience of US […]

We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed.

November 17, 2017 by Blingle Bells Leave a Comment

This was such a beautifully researched work of fiction, it almost feels wrong not to categorize it as a biography. The book can’t be discussed without discussing its use of the first person plural, as in “Some of us read this book. Some of us only looked at it. Some of us never even heard of it.” It’s an unusual choice, and I could certainly see where it could get old. It’s a very slim book and for me, it was just starting to show some […]

When When the Emperor was Divine was just Ok

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka

February 10, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This is one of the okayest books I have ever read. That sounds mean maybe, and I am not trying be, but that’s what it is. At the end, I was like, yes ok, I read that. That book. The one I read. The story is about Japanese Internment, with especial focus on the order, the disappearance of a father, the children affected, and the accompanying racist milieu in the country at large. This is obviously a relevant topic today for plenty of reasons. We […]

A little piece of American history that is too often overlooked

September 25, 2016 by Sophia Leave a Comment

I’ve been interested in learning more about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II for a while now. After reading The Japanese Lover earlier this year, my interest was piqued, and then I heard about The Buddha in the Attic (2011) by Julie Otsuka, Julie Otsuka tells the stories of Japanese picture brides immigrating to America in the early 1900’s. What makes this book unique but also challenging is that she writes in first person plural. The viewpoint is from an unknown number of various […]

Some of us Will Like this Book

August 8, 2016 by melanir Leave a Comment

Buddha in the Attic is an experimental novel about the immigrant women who came to the US from Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. How well this novel works for you will depend mostly on how much you like the experimental style the novel is written in. I was less fond of it, so while I found the novel to be worth reading and interesting, it didn’t really move me in anyway and I didn’t find it particularly memorable. Otsuka tells her story in the […]

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