A Tale for the Time Being review by Josh

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth L. Ozeki

Review by Josh100/100Read January 1, 2020

Buy on Amazon

A Tale For the Time Being is a story that could very easily have gone off the rails in the hands of a less skilled writer, but Ozeki pulled it off well IMO.

Here are just a few of the ingredients: Metafiction, analogies between Buddhism and quantum mechanics, multiple suicidal characters, spirit animals, monographs on avantgarde ecology projects, and online bidding wars for stolen Japanese schoolgirl underwear. You imagine how bad it could be.

Yet Ozeki makes it work. It’s fun, occasionally enlightening, and I even laughed a few times.

About the book

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, she plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace. Across the Pacific a novelist living on a remote island discovers artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox and is pulled into Nao's drama and her unknown fate. (Bestseller)

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth L. Ozeki, and books like it

Books like A Tale for the Time Being