Penny's pick: The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka
Synopsis:
Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” —The New York Times)
is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the
story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco
as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago.
In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic
traces their 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.
In language that has the force and
the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding
novel about the American dream.
Penny says: The story of Japanese picture brides coming to the U.S. All of their fears, thoughts, problems, disappointments, and experiences--arriving, living, working, in California, and what happened to them during WWII. Succinctly and beautifully written.
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