All Over Creation | Ruth L. Ozeki

All Over Creation | Ruth L. Ozeki | The Best Fiction I've Read in a While

books:

All Over Creation

	All Over Creation Ruth L. Ozeki Penguin (Non-Classics), 2004 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki?s delicious debut novel, won a devoted following and was hailed by critics as inventing a new genre: the ?eco-saga.? Now, Ozeki takes us to the heart of the potato farming industry. When Yumi Fuller returns to her hometown after a twenty-five-year absence, she comes face to face with an old friend, her aging parents, and her conflicted past?as well as the ?Seeds of Resistance,? a rollicking environmentalist group that finds trouble wherever they plant themselves. With a quirky cast of characters and a keen eye for the vicissitudes of corporate life, political resistance, youth culture, aging baby boomers, and globalization, as well as the beauty of seeds, roots, and all growing things, All Over Creation offers something for just about everyone.

for more information click here

All Over Creation

Ruth Ozeki is a wonderful writer and environmentalist. This story is as good as "My Year of Meats," or better. I could not stop reading till the last page.

The Best Fiction I've Read in a While

All Over Creation is funny, wise, pertinent. Ozeki delivers an important message . . . . but you would never know it because you were laughing too hard to notice. She touches on issues ranging from the real-time threat to our food supply, the economy, father-daughter love, mother-child love, hell . . . love, period.

She creates for us a full cast of characters--each and every one clearly distinct and richly developed. I read more and more slowly as I neared the end of the book . . . simply because I didn't want it to end.

for more information click here

A Worthy Cause, But...

I admire Ruth Ozeki for taking on serious social and environmental themes in her novels. She has doubtlessly done a great deal through her novels to make her readers aware of the destructive economic and social trends that are currently trasnforming our planet. Furthermore she accomplishes her campaign for public enlightenment with great subtlety.

Having said that I wouldn't rate All Over Creation as a great literary work. The major problem for me as a male reader was that the characters are way too 'cutesy' - you have protagonists with names like 'Puddle', 'Poo' and 'Yummy'. Then you have the portrayal of the activist group the 'Seeds' as nothing more than a group of lost, scummy individuals who epitomise all the worst cliches usually attached to hippy culture, including a teenager who appears to have suffered significant intellectual impairment at some point in his life. To make matters worse the plot is strung between lenghtly domestic scenes which see the book played out predominantly in the kitchen, sickroom and garden. While I realise that these aspects of the novel may simply reflect the fact that it is aimed at a specific demographic I still feel this sickly sweet aspect somehow detracts from the pace of the narrative and the overall feel of the book.

for more information click here

Si tu parles francais...

This is a novel way to incorporate important information about the perils of genetically modified foods and human relationships. My main complaint about the novel is this: One of the characters is French (or French-Canadian?), and when she speaks her native language, putain, she sounds like an idiot. Why couldn't the publisher find someone--anyone--who speaks French to proofread this text? It's embarrassingly bad, even if you haven't gone any further than high school French. And I can guarantee readers that the bad French wasn't intentional... come on, pay attention. Some readers do.

for more information click here

A Not So Hot Potato

I was intrigued enough by Ozeki's "My Year Of Meats" to give this sequel of sorts a try, to see if she could improve on her fresh, amusing satirical style. The result is a small improvement, but not in the way I had hoped and not enough to make me a fan; Ozeki develops her characters better in this effort. You could say that I have had "my month of Ozeki," and I've had enough.

"All Over Creation" is remarkably similar to "My Year Of Meats." It has the same set of quirky, flawed characters, the same fun sense of satire in the first part followed by the same kind of preachiness and tragedy in the second part. Perhaps Ozeki is a meat and potatoes kind of gal, given that her first novel is about meat and this second is about potatoes. But if you read these two novels and take them to heart, you may not want to eat meat and potatoes. How concerned do we really need to be? Who knows? But I do know that the much more serious danger to Americans' health comes from their general diet, not from tainted meat and mutant potatoes. Ozeki has a cute, spunky style that would shine more without the overreaching sermons and tragic melodrama.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

products you might be interested in