The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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 likeLord 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. - Goodreads.com

Review:

This is a very interesting and powerful poem novella about the coming and going of Japanese immigrants around the time of WWII. I liked the style of the poem as Julie Otsuka told the story through the lives and point of views of many people at once. The repetitive verses made the poem fluid and the historical aspect made it enlightening.

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