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Picking Bones From Ash (2009)

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett(Favorite Author)

3.81 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1555975410 (ISBN13: 9781555975418)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Graywolf Press

review 1: Satomi is a young girl living with her single mother in Japan during the 1950's. She is a gifted pianist and success for both of them depends upon developing this talent. Satomi, headstrong, becomes restless with her life in Japan. Her relationship with her mother becomes strained. She eventually leaves Japan to attend school in the United States where she realizes that music is perhaps not something that she loves or wants to continue persuing. She begins collecting and selling Japanese antiques with an American man she falls in love with. Just when we really get to know her, the book jumps ahead twenty years to her daughter, Rumi who has been raised without her mother. What has happened to Satomi? Between mother and daughter, now alternating chapters, we learn about Sato... moremi and what decisions she finally made about her life.
review 2: I respect this author's efforts a lot, but this book didn't work for me. The jump from the perspective of the girl to the woman was just jarring. I had to drop everything I felt about the girl and try to get to know this woman. I was willing to deal with that, get over it, and move on, and never really did when this over-the-top caricature of a mother showed up. At that point I lost interest. I finished the book, but my heart wasn't really in it. It was almost as if the beginning and end of two books were all set up in the author's head, and then the middle was created to try to fuse the end and the beginning together, but it didn't work out quite right. less

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