レビュー

• My wife reports they are all good.

• COUNTRY OF ORIGIIN was a great read: a beautifully written story with considerable color of place and intriguing tension turns. I'm assigning it for my fiction writing class, it's that good. A rare find: one of those packages you get from Amazon.com that offer you a stimulating week--no stop reading once I started.

• I bought this book after listening to a piece about it on NPR. While clearly a proven writer, Don Lee falls short of creating spellbinding drama. The book serves as an interesting vehicle for Lee to comment on Japanese society in particular and our whole societal hangups about race, ethnicity and nationality in general. Certainly, the book will cause you to reflect on these issues. Lee succeeds in conveying a real sense of 1980 Japanese culture (I presume, based upon his personal experience and research, it is objectively accurate); however, I found his character arcs weak, his story disjointed, and his dramatic conflict lacking. The book never achieves a page turning crescendo, there is no climax, and the denouement is a fizzle. Maybe it's just too cerebral for me. Please pass me the Grisham.

• One of the worst books I have struggled to read in many, many years. Got all the way through it simply because I thought there must be SOMETHING at the end to clean up the mess. There wasn't.

• Rarely do I bail out on a book. Even if I don't like it at first, I still give it a chance to gather momentum and redeem itself. This one didn't redeem itself. I bailed.

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