Once Removed

Rating:
Summary: I am now a bigger fan!
Review: I am a big fan of Mako's first book. Her second installment is as equally powerful and moving. Just like One Hundred and One Ways, the characters in this book are strong and the plot line is intruiging--I could not put the book down once I started reading it. One of the best things about Once Removed is the main Asian male character. You don't find a lot of romantic, leading men who are Asian in mainstream American media--right on Mako!!!

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly hard to read
Review: One Hundred and One Ways captivated me from the first page. I would wake up at 4:30am just to read for a few hours before work and finished in two days.
Perhaps my expectations were too high for a follow up to such a gripping debut, but i found Once Removed to be profoundly disappointing. The story starts off with 4 or 5 different narrators and introduces back stories to characters (such as Sachiko, the great aunt) which aren't really pertinent to the story.
Had she stuck with one or two narrators, the story would have been much easier to follow. Instead, it flips around between characters, between past and present and cities and countries in a way that makes it hard to follow. I couldn't quite follow her styling until i was 170 pages into the book.
The other confusing element is, if you can imagine, the way which she interrupts sentences (oh, and then adds something really clever-possibly even with a highly personalized thought or styling?- though not ultimately pertinent) with so many commas, such as something like this, and it becomes, more than likely, hard to follow. Trying to sort through small sets of these each page grows tiring and disorenting rather fast.
I still admire the author and will no doubt read her next novel, but ultimately i was left unconvinced, and felt that this novel was a huge step back instead of forward for Ms. Yoshikawa.