A review by lelandbuck
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

2.0

I struggled with this book. Like most of Julie Otsuka's writings, this book is concise and quite dense. It deals with weighty themes. It is a bold, potent book but it is not a great novel. Much of it is written in a communal, first-person plural, and so it often reads like a kind of manifest of a whole community. Characters are vague and thinly revealed in the fog of this communal narrator. I found the presentation distracting, and that reduced the impact of the writing significantly.