A review by crowyhead
Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori

3.0

A YA novel about Yuki, a Japanese girl whose mother commits suicide when Yuki is twelve. The author does an excellent job of conveying Yuki's sense of difference from other children, as well as her confusion about what to feel towards her mother. I did feel frustrated in that Yuki's stepmother, Hanae, is pretty much unrelentingly meanspirited, and Yuki's father isn't much better. I suppose, however, that while in the third person, the novel is told predominantly from Yuki's point of view, so Hanae is likely to come across as a fairly unsympathetic character, anyway.