Reviews and Comments

The start was confusing and I'm not sure if the stories really needed to exist in the same book. That being said, each of the stories stuck with me in their own way, and supported one another sufficiently. I ended up liking how they got wrapped up. I do think that it would have been okay for the characters to be more historically mundane, to not have such notable epilogues, but maybe they only feel so notable because I know what they went through, making them not feel so mundane as they might in the grand scheme of things. Maybe I'm too used to folx at the margins not being recognized for the work, that it makes me feel self conscious when our simple actions of survival become a part of something that feels so much bigger than we realized.

This has been on my PTR for a bit. A friend encouraged me to check it out because it shares some similarities to the book/show "Silo" (which is based on a book series) and the book/show "The Expanse". Like Silo, the people are "siloed" onto a ship, and the different levels are reflective of different social classes. Like the Expanse, more effort is put into exploring how this spacial disparity impacts cultural practices with more diversity than we see in Silo, particularly through things like language. I wasn't completely sure if I'd like to stick with it, but it's definitely better than some of the other books I've been dropping lately.

one of the better books I've read coming from Japan of recent. felt like there was a lot of depth, and there were a lot of unexpected twists. it was hard for me to predict where the author was going to take things. excellent commentary on Japanese gender roles and fatphobia. despite being a "foodie" book, it focuses a lot more on conversations of labor and cultural capital, usually skipped over in more "wholesome" japanese cuisine themed media.