I was so excited to receive this book for Christmas. It came with such high reviews, and touted as a NY Times bestseller, I expected to be drawn into a lovely tragic story. Tragic, it was. Lovely, it was not. The author doesn’t have the natural command of language nor the imperative sense of cultural awareness to write a book with such a plot in such a setting. The book reads like a badly written tween novel, inserting American phrases and idioms into — seriously? — post-war Japan. I suggest that aspiring writers either stick to what they know or do the research required when writing about historical eras and geographical regions in which they are ill-educated.