A review by toolittletime
Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada

hopeful mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

This book was beautifully written and posed some interesting questions about language loss and how to keep your culture when the place that it is from is gone (maybe?). However there were a few major issues that kept me from enjoying the book. One was the really horrible treatment of the trans woman character, Akash. She was constantly misgendered by the people around her and no acknowledgment of that rudeness. Her trans identity is regarded as a quirky element of her personality more than anything else. The other thing was the constant use the racial slur for Inuit people, even after the text itself mentioned that fact that word is a slur! The Inuit character, Nanook, used it constantly to refer to himself in a way that just felt weird. 

The book also ended in a way that was so sudden, I legit thought for a moment my copy was a misprint and there was another bunch of pages missing.