electronic resource
English language
Published Dec. 25, 2009 by Penguin USA, Inc..
My Year of Meats is the 1998 debut novel by Ruth Ozeki. The book takes advantage of the differences between Japanese and American culture to comment on both.
I was interested at first, and there’s clearly some good commentary here on American values. Also commentary on the Japanese view of America and vice versa. But I like to feel like what I’m reading has some stakes, and I don’t feel that here.
I was expecting more after enjoying A Tale of the Time Being so much.
Ozeki's first novel. So she hadn't hit her stride yet.
I got the feeling that she'd wanted to write an exposé about the dangers of hormones in meat production, but decided to wrap it in a novel, to get more people to read it. And so ended up writing a novel about a woman who creates an exposé about the dangers of hormones in meat production. She created a plot to showcase all the horrible things that go bad in feedlots and slaughterhouses, and then set up stock characters to populate the story. The male characters in particular came across as stereotypes.
