A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

I heard the author interviewed by Shelagh Rogers on CBC, and I was impressed by Ruth. An Asian who suffered from bullying similar to Nao in the story, Ruth choose her own name and that of her husband, Oliver, as the Canadian couple who discover a Hello Kitty backpack on the beach of BC, and thus discover Nao's diary, a teen living in Japan at the time of the tsunami in 2011. Ruth sets about trying to find what has happened to Nao, in between reading her diary and getting to know this 16 year old girl who really has a pretty grim life, from her parents' difficulties with depression and attempts at suicide, to the extreme physical bullying she endures at school. It is only in spending a summer at the tBuddhist temple of her grand-mother high in the mountains of Northern Japan that Nao finds ways of coping with her life.

I was more impressed with the interview, and the character development in this book. I found the excellence of writing a little less than I would have liked, something which becomes even more important to me as I read more books.