A Tale for the Time Being - Rambling Readers

Audiobook

English language

Published March 11, 2013 by Canongate.

(3 reviews)

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)

3 editions

pdotb@wyrms.de reviewed A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Good until the deus ex machina

4 stars

Content warning spoilers, cw: suicide, bullying, sexual assault

I'm a bit torn as to how to review this. It was all going so well until the last fifty pages or so. Well, two of the main characters are suicidal for much of the book, and there's some pretty awful bullying going on, but it's still, somehow, enjoyable. All of a sudden things are neatly tied up by an intervention that comes out of nowhere, and then we're off into QM and Schrödinger's cat, and Everett's many-worlds interpretation, and I'm just wondering where the novel went to...

JesseLiberty

rated it

Oct. 16, 2021

Simon Fairbairn

rated it

Oct. 1, 2017

Subjects

Women authors
Teenage girls
Buddhist nuns
Fiction
FICTION / Literary