The Buddha in the Attic

My first book review of the year! 
And I'm starting off with 
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.

In Otsuka's Pen/Failkner Award Winning novel for fiction we follow the lives of Japanese picture brides in the early 1900's. We follow the many stories of these women as they travel by boat from their home lands to this new foreign country. We are with them as they meet their husbands, work, and bare children throughout their new lives in America.  Through Otsuka's beautiful writing style we become one with these women and their lives, we feel their journey as if it were our own.

I give this book 9 out of 10 stars

I LOVED this book.  The title and the cover caught my attention at first, I had never heard of it and I just picked it up and decided to give it a try.  Man am I glad I did.  It's a super quick read it's only about 130 pages roughly.  I love Otsuka's writing style, she doesn't write in the conventional sense of perspective.  Instead of writing from one woman's point of view or even a third person omniscient perspective but from the perspective of the group of women collectively.  It's so interesting and I've never read anything written quite like it.  Overall this book is a wonderful look at a culture and time period radically different from our own. It's a great mix of history with a fictional voice, I highly recommend it.  This is the second of Otsuka's novels and you can be sure I'm going to read her first. So if you like this one, stay tuned for When the Emperor was Divine.