2.5 stars. I would definitely count Ruth Ozeki among my favorite authors, and that's truly the only reason I managed to finish this book. Unfortunately, I didn't like, sympathize with, or care about any of the characters in it. Given that I would usually say Ozeki's characterization is extremely strong, this was a huge disappointment. Her books are often very message-heavy, but typically they don't come across as preachy and cringeworthy like this one did. Maybe I just don't have a liking for hippies. Additionally, it seems there was an unrealistic usage of the internet for the year in which this book was set. Overall, this book was a letdown, and I would recommend skipping it if you're interested in Ozeki's work.

This is a book that offers a well-paced and well-written narrative, making it an interesting read. However, it falls short when compared to "A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki.

One aspect that I didn't quite like was the inconsistent use of narrative perspective. Having one character in the first person and everyone else in the third person created a bit of a disjointed feel.

Moreover, the ending seemed to come together too neatly considering the rest of the novel. There were a few plot points that felt a bit too convenient, detracting from the overall realism of the story.

Despite these drawbacks, the book still has its merits. The writing is engaging, and it manages to hold the reader's attention throughout. It just doesn't reach the same level of excellence as some of the other works in the genre.

Overall, it's an okay read, but not one that I would highly recommend. If you're looking for a more profound and satisfying literary experience, you might want to look elsewhere.

Ever since I gave birth to my first baby in 2023, I found myself completely unable to read. The demands of motherhood took over my life, leaving no time or energy for my once-beloved pastime. Then, this August, I had my second child, and something神奇的 happened. Since then, I've been devouring books at an astonishing rate, as if trying to make up for the time lost. In the past 4 months alone, I've read approximately 42 books!

\\"All Over Creation\\" was the first book that truly made me cry. For most of the way, it was a solid 3.5 - 4 star read. But then, in the last section, I found myself becoming way too emotionally invested in all these crazy characters. Lying in bed, wrapped up with my two sleeping babies, one on each side of me, I sobbed quietly as I read about Cass finally getting what she so richly deserved. She deserved the world! In my little love bubble, I couldn't even bring myself to hate on Yummy. She is just flawed, like we all are. She's doing her best with what she knows and with the traumas she's experienced. As a mother myself, I can understand her struggles.

Ruth Ozeki is such a talented writer. She has breathed life into all of these characters, making them feel so real and relatable. I'll probably forget every one of them because that's just the way my memory works, but I truly hope not to! Except for Elliot Rhodes, he can just... well, you know what I mean!

\\"He jiggled his foot some more, and in that gap, while time unfolded and I waited, I was overwhelmed by what seemed to me like a miracle, in all its humdrum banality: There he was, my son, sitting in front of me contemplating fate and making decisions about his very own life. It brought tears to my eyes.\\" This passage really touched my heart and made me realize the preciousness of every moment with my children.

Finally finished this. Good lord.

I listened to it because Anna Fields is one of my favorite narrators. She truly captured the characters wonderfully. I could vividly imagine each of their personalities in all of their strange and dysfunctional ways. However, unfortunately, the writing was rather weak and the characters seemed shallow, especially the main character, Yumi. The conversations went on for an extremely long time and were rather vapid and immature.

Although I'm not as knowledgeable as I would like to be about GMO engineering, Ozeki did seem to have a solid understanding of the subject as related by the hippie-travelers who took up residence on Yumi's parents' farm in Idaho.

I didn't really feel a connection to many of the characters. I just felt sorry that the kids involved had to tolerate such an inept mother who could not seem to stop making bad decisions. It was truly a relief when this finally came to an end.

Overall, while the narration by Anna Fields was excellent, the story itself had several flaws that made it a less than satisfying read or listen.

There's a speculative fiction show I was watching on Netflix for a while. I was drawn to its horror elements, its refreshingly realistic portrayal of world languages in the 21st century, and a banging (albeit sometimes obnoxious) soundtrack.

As the episodes progressed, it became increasingly evident that the show wouldn't be able to credibly maintain its cast with the allotted time for each character's development if it wanted to keep them all alive. It's not an insurmountable problem, but once the narrative showed more interest in normalizing status quo hierarchies rather than humanizing relationships that leaned more towards anarchy than authority, all the characters took on various shades of blandness. It remains to be seen whether I'll find the motivation to finish the last few episodes.

This book's methods and errors are in very similar realms. I imagine Ozeki realized this when I traced the trajectory from her 2003 work to the 2013 "A Tale for the Time Being", which is one of my absolute favorites and makes me return to her writing every few years. Then again, I liked her 1998 "My Year of Meats" well enough. So perhaps it was a matter of trial and error, expanding the number of consecutive plots and jostling personalities as an experiment and contracting when the reception was lacking.

In some ways, I've mellowed in life, at least in terms of my goals in relation to my awareness of my own strengths and limitations. In others, most of what life has taught me has further solidified my more radical opinions. If the stock market disappeared on Monday, I'd go to work for my six-month review and talk to my boss about how that would likely affect our patrons and what we could do to help.

As such, the best books that don't offer much in the way of escapism tap into the same mindset that I've built my professional career on. Ozeki is one author I keep in the back of my mind when looking for the next piece of literature that is as invested in equity as it is in good writing. At times, this book hits that particular surge of community welfare and life-giving camaraderie, and the feeling is like no other. However, when it comes down to it, it's much more willing to talk about 'DEI' and'representation' than about strikes and Black Panther-style community welfare, which sometimes results in really poorly constructed characters and extremely insipid plot lines, especially towards the end.

All in all, this was a lackluster read, especially compared to what I've read of Ozeki previously. However, it wasn't enough to turn me off her writing for good, which is fortunate since her latest read intrigues me and is conveniently available at my workplace library. These days, most authors who align with my ideologies tend to stick to nonfiction. The sheer number of books on my TBR list after over a decade means I still rarely read something within six months of adding it, i.e., indulging in what might best suit my current tastes.

This makes finding a piece of fiction that explicitly discusses the sociopolitical and doesn't irritate me a worthy endeavor. Given my almost six-month-old and still new full-time job status, I have less time and opportunity than ever to sift through the offerings carefully. So, if you're wondering whether you should read this, unless you have a real thing for potatoes, I don't recommend it. This is not Ozeki at her best, and she's done so much unique writing that's relatively easy to obtain that there's not much point in tracking this down instead. If someone stumbles upon this work and it leads them to her others, that's great. They just better be prepared for stronger writing with a much sharper attitude.

I picked this up off the swap shelf in our school library.

Years ago, I read My Year of Meat by this author and was truly blown away. Here, it seems that this work might lean more towards being a story rather than pure education, yet the message regarding scientific developments in agriculture comes through loud and clear.

There are numerous other themes present as well - from radicalism, activism, and opportunism to the complex relationships between parents and their children, abuse, fertility, and so on.

One aspect that irritates me when reading is when there is a blatant billboard warning of impending disaster within the narrative. Yes, the entire story revolves around the growing disaster that is modern agribusiness, but here it is more in relation to the characters. It's like a constant reminder: watch out, what comes next will be awful. My reaction to this is to put the book down and take a step back for a while.

Perhaps this is intended to make the reader race through the last pages to the end. However, I didn't require that kind of push, and as I mentioned, it really irked me.

Otherwise, I found the book to be very moving and well-written. The author has a talent for creating engaging characters and a storyline that keeps the reader hooked, despite the flaws that I pointed out.

Overall, it's a book that I would recommend to others, with the caveat that they might want to be prepared for the somewhat heavy-handed warnings of disaster.

Boise Literature for Lunch Spring 2016 was an exciting event that brought together literature enthusiasts in Boise.

It offered a unique opportunity for people to gather during their lunch breaks and immerse themselves in the world of words.

The event featured a diverse range of literary works, including short stories, poems, and excerpts from novels.

Authors and poets took the stage to share their creations, captivating the audience with their vivid descriptions and engaging narratives.

The atmosphere was lively and filled with a sense of community as attendees listened intently, laughed, and sometimes even shed a tear.

Boise Literature for Lunch Spring 2016 not only provided a welcome escape from the daily routine but also inspired a love for literature and a desire to explore new works.

It was a memorable event that left a lasting impression on all those who attended.

Whether you were a seasoned reader or just beginning to discover the joys of literature, this event had something for everyone.

It was a celebration of the written word and a testament to the power of literature to connect people and touch their hearts.

I got this book for free from a yard sale early last summer. I only managed to get about halfway through it, and it's quite astonishing that I even reached that far. The truth is, I sort of loathed this book and didn't really like it throughout the entire reading process. I know it might seem absurd that I continued, but there are a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's like slowing down to look at an interesting car wreck; you're curious to see how it all plays out in the end. Secondly, it was sitting on the back of the toilet, and whenever I went in to pee, it was right there, so I'd read another two pages.

So, I made extremely slow progress through this book that I disliked immensely. Maybe another part of the reason I sometimes persist in reading a book I don't like is that I like to figure out why I don't like it. Just as when you tell someone you didn't like a restaurant, you should be able to pinpoint the reason. The food was too greasy, too expensive, or the waiter was intoxicated and spilled a mai tai down your front. It seems like the same principle applies here. At first, I only had a vague sense of why I didn't like the book.

This book is about a woman named Yumi, the daughter of a WWII veteran turned potato farmer and his Japanese war bride. However, because it's rural Idaho, everyone pronounces her name as "Yummy." As a result, there are frequent references to "Na Na The Yummy Song." Anyway, sometime in the 70s when she's around 14, she is seduced by a high school teacher with an Asian fetish and gets pregnant. He takes her to Pocatello for a secret abortion, and when her parents find out, some terrible things happen, and she runs away. Apparently, she lives on the street for a couple of years and then enrolls in college. She doesn't return home to Idaho. She has her first child in 1984 or thereabouts with a gay man she knows is gay and eventually marries and moves to Texas with him. She names this first child Phoenix.

Now, not to completely disrupt my faithful retelling of this narrative, but one of the first major things that gave me that queasy feeling was the fact that she named her child after Professor Dumbledore's pet bird. If Dumbledore's bird was simply named according to its breed instead of having a real name (which was Fawkes), it's like people who name their dog "Dog." At least she didn't name him "Kid."

Anyway, about six years later, she has a daughter with another guy and names her "Ocean." Ugh. Then, about six years after that, she has another baby, a boy whose real name I can't remember, and they call it Poo. Which, actually, I prefer to either of the other two children's names.

So, she's living in Hawaii, working part-time in real estate under the DBA "Yummy Acres" and teaching at the college level because she got a doctorate, I think. Then her childhood friend contacts her to let her know that her dad's colon had to be removed and he's dying, and her mom is basically completely senile. So, she comes back to Idaho with her kids on a temporary basis, and it's pretty much awful.

Meanwhile, some traveling hippies pick up a foster kid named Frank somewhere further east and go on a pilgrimage to meet the grandparents of Phoenix, Ocean, and Poo. Because, I forgot to mention, they run an organic back-to-earth heirloom seed business in addition to potato farming. Anyway, this foster kid gets one of the hippie chicks pregnant, and they all head west to teach everyone about the evils of big agriculture and genetically engineered foods.

With these two things, the stupid names and the self-righteous hippies, I had a bad taste in my mouth. But there was something else bothering me that I couldn't quite put my finger on yet. And I slowly started to realize that the problem was that the author published this book in 2003, and the book is set in 1998, and it's painfully obvious that she has no idea what the internet was like back then. It's not like the internet has always been the same and then suddenly became more popular. There have been significant technological advancements in that regard.

I had this vague feeling that the book wasn't entirely accurate from the beginning. The hippies spend a lot of time on the internet, but it's not entirely clear where, although I doubt it's happening in their crappy recreational vehicle. Wireless wasn't really available back then. And the book relies heavily on the internet to advance certain aspects of the plot. Characters are constantly looking up each other and various information and companies on the internet. The main character, "Yummy," has a website for her real estate business, complete with a blink tag, I'm sure. I mean, it was 1998, right?

It was bothering me, but I didn't have extremely concrete objections just yet. Back then, most "normal" people didn't have much of an internet presence. Your average person just barely knew how to do e-mail and Yahoo search and had never even heard of Google. They called it the "World Wide Web" or just "the web" if they thought they were really cool. Google was so new that it was like the delicate premature infant of search engines, and it was only something that internet nerds were talking about. I remember the first time I saw a TV commercial with an internet address. It seemed completely crazy, and I remember sitting there thinking, "Oh my god, I could look at this commercial and this company's website at the same time, if only the computer and the TV were close to each other!"

Then I read a little further, and by the time I gave up, I was thoroughly disgusted with the book. Apparently, the pregnant girl planned to give birth at home (in their RV?) and was doing extensive birthing research online. Part of this research involved watching videos of births in progress. At this point, I stopped second-guessing my memory of the internet in 1998. I know for a fact that, having lived in such a place myself at the time, people in rural America were not watching video on their dial-up internet in 1998. That was difficult enough on a T-1 connection in college dorms in 2001.

In 1998, I had already been an internet junkie for years. We lived out in the sticks, and I didn't know anyone who had anything better than dial-up at home. The only place you could go to have "fast" internet access was a college campus, or if you were really lucky, high school. At our house in the country, the maximum internet speed was around 2K per second. TWO KILOBYTES. I remember being really impressed that in town, my boyfriend (now my husband) was able to get a lightning-fast 7K per second. It only took him about ten minutes to download an MP3, which were just starting to gain popularity then. I mean, wow. That was fast. I was seriously jealous of that. In 1998, the idea of video on the internet seemed like an absurdly unattainable science fiction dream. I didn't know anyone who could afford the kind of equipment needed to put video on the internet. And not even a college T-1 was fast enough to do the kind of live video streams we see now or that the author was describing. It would take days to download a video file, even if you could handle watching it on your slow 300MHz computer. We had a friend who bought a 400MHz computer with, MY GOD, a CD burner that summer, and it was like the most amazing thing I could imagine at the time. Nowadays, you'd probably throw up in your mouth just looking at a computer like that. But back then, it was luxurious enough if you simply had a second telephone line so you could get phone calls and be on the internet at the same time. Nobody did video. Nobody.

I guess I shouldn't get so worked up. Probably most publishers don't think it's very important to fact-check fiction. But it still irritates me to no end when I come across completely inaccurate stuff like this while reading. It just makes it impossible to take the thing seriously and really detracts from the story. How am I supposed to have any respect for the author's story if she couldn't be bothered to do the basic research to make sure she doesn't look like a fool?

I started this book once where the author referred to a character admiring the shiny "chassey" on her car. I believe after that, she may have gotten out a "shemmy cloth." People. If the chassis on your car is exposed to the point that you can see it just by walking up, you probably have a serious problem, and you shouldn't be standing there admiring the damn thing like an idiot. And forget the chamois cloth. Seeing these ridiculous errors made it impossible for me to read the rest of the book, which was a terrible piece of junk aside from that. But seriously, how can you have any regard for a person who is comfortable writing about things they know nothing about?

Anyway, I dropped this book off in a work book swap after deciding I had my own permission to stop reading the stupid thing.

“Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.”

The Good:

I must say that I truly relished this book. So many of its themes were precisely within my area of interest when it comes to outstanding and influential literature. The concept of redemption for Yumi, the radical politics, the emphasis on food chains, and the focus on the next generation were all truly remarkable to me. The seeds and their organization intrigued me greatly. It indeed brought a tear to my eye when Cassie is given the baby at the end, and Frank realizes that the purpose of his involvement was to make the world a better place for his daughter :').

The not so Good:

Although I adored numerous themes, this book at times suffered from a lack of attention to certain aspects that I believed would be extremely fascinating. Objectively, Yumi is a good character in theory. Her entire concept of being in Idaho is highly compelling, and a great deal of the forgiveness she experiences with her dad is really nice. However, her constant affairs with Elliott and her unwavering rigidity and inability to learn from those around her were rather bothersome, especially considering the significant amount of space they occupied. I understand that a large part of her plot is intended to convey the idea that being back in the same place rekindled old habits. But I constantly wondered what was happening with literally anyone else (especially Momoko, whom I desperately desired to have more development! Her seeds were so cool to me!) when it would drone on about Yumi going to have sex with Elliott in the hotel once again or otherwise irritating everyone in some way. I anticipated more growth from her at the beginning, and unfortunately, we did not witness as much.

This idea of Yumi cyclically repeating the same mistakes, over and over again, is disrupted when Phoenix decides not to run away at the age of 14 like she did and instead stays to build a relationship with his mother.

“How the fuck are we supposed to learn anything? How are we supposed to make any progress?”

The answer lies in perceiving oneself as part of one humanity and a component of something much greater than oneself, as a single link in a long chain of progress. The answer lies in placing value in seeds.

This book serves as a poignant reminder. Just a few short years ago, I was an active contributor to the economy. However, the great recession hit, and my discretionary spending has now dwindled to the point where I can only afford a library card. Since then, this is the very first book that I deeply regret not purchasing. The reason being, I would have loved to lend it to all of my "green-thumb" cohorts.

I was truly enamored with the pace of this book. It kept me engaged from start to finish. The character development was outstanding. From the initially clueless and narcissistic beautiful protagonist, to her children, her wholesome, grounded, and wise childhood friend, and even her Mommy-san and Daddy. Each character was brought to life in a vivid and believable manner.

The well-organized group of green revolutionaries and the evil tools of the corporate world added an extra layer of depth and intrigue to the story. I was also captivated by the beauty of how the grass roots cultivation of heritage seeds sprouted into a cause that united a vast medley of believable motives, lives, and events.

What I love most is that all of this was set in the vast acreage of Idaho's potato fields and grew into a rich banquet of a wonderfully plotted novel. This book is an early 21st century novel in the vein of John Nichols' Milargo Bean Field Wars. After reading it, you'll be ready to become a conscientious objector against GMO's and will have a newfound concern and respect for the humble potato. Although, you may also find yourself wishing that the title of the book was different.

Ughhhhh!!!! So good!!!

Ruth Ozeki has once again worked her magic. I have an absolute passion for her writing style. The way she crafts her characters is simply outstanding, and the personal voice she infuses into everything she creates is truly captivating.

I awarded this book four stars. The reason being that I have read two other books of hers, and in my humble opinion, those were even better. However, in a general sense, this is indeed a five-star book. But when judged by Ruth Ozeki's own high standards, it just narrowly misses out on that fifth star and earns a solid four.

Her works always manage to draw me in and keep me hooked from start to finish. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

I have a great admiration for Ozeki's more recent novels. However, this particular one didn't quite resonate with me as strongly. There could be several reasons for this. Firstly, it might be a little dated, which could potentially affect its appeal in the current literary landscape. Secondly, although her writing and characterizations are undeniably beautiful, the pacing of this novel seems a bit slower compared to her later works. This slower pace might make it a less engaging read for some. Nevertheless, I am still glad that I took the time to read it. It offered a different perspective and allowed me to further explore Ozeki's literary style and themes.