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All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki
A warm and witty saga about agribusiness, environmental activism, and community—from the celebrated author of My Year of Meats and A Tale for the Time Being
Yumi Fuller hasn’t set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho—heart of the potato-farming industry—since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping car, “The Spudnick,” biofueled by pilfered McDonald’s french-fry oil. Following her widely hailed, award-winning debut novel, My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki returns here to deliver a quirky cast of characters and a wickedly humorous appreciation of the foibles of corporate life, globalization, political resistance, youth culture, and aging baby boomers. All Over Creation tells a celebratory tale of the beauty of seeds, roots, and growth—and the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.
Yumi Fuller hasn’t set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho—heart of the potato-farming industry—since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping car, “The Spudnick,” biofueled by pilfered McDonald’s french-fry oil. Following her widely hailed, award-winning debut novel, My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki returns here to deliver a quirky cast of characters and a wickedly humorous appreciation of the foibles of corporate life, globalization, political resistance, youth culture, and aging baby boomers. All Over Creation tells a celebratory tale of the beauty of seeds, roots, and growth—and the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.
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First published January 1, 2003
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About the author
Ruth Ozeki
20 books6,520 followersRuth Ozeki (born in New Haven, Connecticut) is a Japanese American novelist. She is the daughter of anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury.
Ozeki published her debut novel, My Year of Meats, in 1998. She followed up with All Over Creation in 2003. Her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was published on March 12, 2013.
She is married to Canadian land artist Oliver Kellhammer, and the couple divides their time between New York City and Vancouver.
Ozeki published her debut novel, My Year of Meats, in 1998. She followed up with All Over Creation in 2003. Her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was published on March 12, 2013.
She is married to Canadian land artist Oliver Kellhammer, and the couple divides their time between New York City and Vancouver.
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June 15, 2022I really like Ruth Ozeki, and I really appreciate the conscientious way she writes. Her most recent novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2012), is one of the best books I've ever read, and My Year of Meats was also very strong. All Over Creation had some really bright spots, and overall, it was a compelling story... it was just that there was so much of it. It felt overlong and overextended. Clocking in at 16 hours on audio, and 430 pages, it was just too much of a good thing.
I like family dramas - both books and on the screen. I like stories of resistance and quiet revolutions, and people with passion. I loved the heirloom plants and gardening sections. I loved the Idaho setting. These were the things I loved about the book. What I didn't love: Cass's constant pining for a baby, Yumi's irresponsible parenting, and the insensitive way that a murder was just kind of shrugged off by the community, and the way that the matriarch of the family was marginalized because of her dementia.
Less Yumi drama, less baby drama, and more about the Seeds of Resistance and Momoko's quiet seed revolution. That would have been a better balance for me.
All that being said... I still love Ozeki and will read anything and everything she writes.
I like family dramas - both books and on the screen. I like stories of resistance and quiet revolutions, and people with passion. I loved the heirloom plants and gardening sections. I loved the Idaho setting. These were the things I loved about the book. What I didn't love: Cass's constant pining for a baby, Yumi's irresponsible parenting, and the insensitive way that a murder was just kind of shrugged off by the community, and the way that the matriarch of the family was marginalized because of her dementia.
Less Yumi drama, less baby drama, and more about the Seeds of Resistance and Momoko's quiet seed revolution. That would have been a better balance for me.
All that being said... I still love Ozeki and will read anything and everything she writes.
May 25, 2015
“Lloyd’s home, Mom.” I fingered the straggling ends of my mother’s hair. And your daughter is having a nervous breakdown. And there’s a caravan of hippies camping out behind the barn. Oh, and you’re a prophet of the Revolution.”
All Over Creation is probably Ruth Ozeki's weakest book to date, and yet, I devoured it in just one hung-over weekend.
I'm not going to say much about the plot other than that it is the story of a family who split apart over a matter of principle and who are slowly coming to terms with each other, life, illness, death, and all the things around them.
Whilst Ozeki's writing is for the most part wonderful, I felt that All Over Creation was trying too hard to accomplish two things:
1. home in on the environmental message of the book; and
2. dwell on scenes and descriptions for dramatic effect.
The book did not need to do this and there were a few scenes where I felt that less would have been more - especially at the end.
However, I was moved and engaged, and it made me laugh and provided all "the feelz", and I will not hold the over-kill of emotional writing on a handful of scenes against the rest of a book that clearly engages a more intellectual appreciation for the way Ozeki formed her characters and gave them voices that are so real that I had no trouble imagining them.
As spaced out as my introductory quote sounds, there is much more to the book than the family saga and in a way there are two parallel stories - one about the family and one about the family business (selling plant seeds) - and sometimes it is not clear if the story is about the family or the seeds, and this metaphorical conundrum is where Ozeki's craft shows:
“But they’re ours. We have to keep them safe!” She shook her head. “No. Keeping is not safe. Keeping is danger. Only safe way is letting go. Giving everything away. Freely. Freely.”
All Over Creation is probably Ruth Ozeki's weakest book to date, and yet, I devoured it in just one hung-over weekend.
I'm not going to say much about the plot other than that it is the story of a family who split apart over a matter of principle and who are slowly coming to terms with each other, life, illness, death, and all the things around them.
Whilst Ozeki's writing is for the most part wonderful, I felt that All Over Creation was trying too hard to accomplish two things:
1. home in on the environmental message of the book; and
2. dwell on scenes and descriptions for dramatic effect.
The book did not need to do this and there were a few scenes where I felt that less would have been more - especially at the end.
However, I was moved and engaged, and it made me laugh and provided all "the feelz", and I will not hold the over-kill of emotional writing on a handful of scenes against the rest of a book that clearly engages a more intellectual appreciation for the way Ozeki formed her characters and gave them voices that are so real that I had no trouble imagining them.
As spaced out as my introductory quote sounds, there is much more to the book than the family saga and in a way there are two parallel stories - one about the family and one about the family business (selling plant seeds) - and sometimes it is not clear if the story is about the family or the seeds, and this metaphorical conundrum is where Ozeki's craft shows:
“But they’re ours. We have to keep them safe!” She shook her head. “No. Keeping is not safe. Keeping is danger. Only safe way is letting go. Giving everything away. Freely. Freely.”
September 11, 2016
Well as an Irish woman how could I not like a book about the importance of family and farming potatoes? As an undergraduate of Biochemistry in 2001, completing my Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in 2005, how could I not have been interested in the debates over genetically modified food specific to the early naughties? Add Ruth Ozeki's writing into the mix (I have loved her since I listened to her reading of her novel A Tale for the Time Being on audible ) and yes this novel could have been written especially for me.
This is a book about abortions and infertility, farming and big pharma, old and new friendships, birth and death, science, philosophy, religion, etc. Mostly though it's about how we love, how we show it, what we do when someone dosesn't love us back, how teenagers drive their parents crazy and vice versa.
My only complaint? I wanted to slap the main character Yumi hard- what a complete selfish idiot!
I "read" this on audible and would also like to recommend the narrator Anna Fields.
This is a book about abortions and infertility, farming and big pharma, old and new friendships, birth and death, science, philosophy, religion, etc. Mostly though it's about how we love, how we show it, what we do when someone dosesn't love us back, how teenagers drive their parents crazy and vice versa.
My only complaint? I wanted to slap the main character Yumi hard- what a complete selfish idiot!
I "read" this on audible and would also like to recommend the narrator Anna Fields.
November 13, 2021
All Over Creation was my first Ozeki novel. I know she's got a new book out, but since my library hasn't yet added the audiobook to their collection, I decided to try whatever was available as an audiobook, as I didn't want to add another book on my neglected pile of books on my bedside table.
This novel has at its centre the Fullers, who own a potato farm in Liberty Falls, Idaho. Lloyd is a successful potato grower. His Japanese wife, Momoko, is a keen gardener, who's started a seed business. Their only daughter, Yumi, feels stifled.
This is a relatively long novel beginning in the 70s up to the late 90s.
We first meet fourteen-year-old Yumi, who is seduced by her history teacher. Yumi and her father's relationship falls apart. Yumi runs away.
Twenty five years later, Lloyd is dying, he's had cancer and several heart attacks. Momoko has Alzheimers and is too fragile to look after Lloyd.
Cassie Unger, Yumi's former best friend and neighbour, looks after the Fullers, but she's got her own obligations. Hearing that Lloyd doesn't have long to live, she tracks down Yumi, now living in Hawaii, and tells her to come home.
Yumi is almost forty, she teaches and also sells real estate. She's got a forteen-year-old boy, Phonix, an almost seven-year-old daughter, Ocean, and a one-year-old, Poo - the kids all have different fathers.
Life is messy. Relationships are messy. It's so easy to break them even when there's love.
Ozeki adds more to the mix, and as far as I'm concerned, it made the novel all that much interesting.
There's a group of environmental activists who are fighting against the bioengineering companies that are pushing their products onto the stretched farmers. They're taking residence in the Fuller's drive with their bus, in exchange for helping with taking care of Lloyd and helping Mamoko's seed business.
This novel is imperfect and it could be accused of being message-y and sentimental (I don't see how one could avoid those accusations when one addresses GMOs and corporate farming) but I really enjoyed it.
I'm looking forward to reading more by Ruzeki.
Anna Fields' narration was extraordinary.
This novel has at its centre the Fullers, who own a potato farm in Liberty Falls, Idaho. Lloyd is a successful potato grower. His Japanese wife, Momoko, is a keen gardener, who's started a seed business. Their only daughter, Yumi, feels stifled.
This is a relatively long novel beginning in the 70s up to the late 90s.
We first meet fourteen-year-old Yumi, who is seduced by her history teacher. Yumi and her father's relationship falls apart. Yumi runs away.
Twenty five years later, Lloyd is dying, he's had cancer and several heart attacks. Momoko has Alzheimers and is too fragile to look after Lloyd.
Cassie Unger, Yumi's former best friend and neighbour, looks after the Fullers, but she's got her own obligations. Hearing that Lloyd doesn't have long to live, she tracks down Yumi, now living in Hawaii, and tells her to come home.
Yumi is almost forty, she teaches and also sells real estate. She's got a forteen-year-old boy, Phonix, an almost seven-year-old daughter, Ocean, and a one-year-old, Poo - the kids all have different fathers.
Life is messy. Relationships are messy. It's so easy to break them even when there's love.
Ozeki adds more to the mix, and as far as I'm concerned, it made the novel all that much interesting.
There's a group of environmental activists who are fighting against the bioengineering companies that are pushing their products onto the stretched farmers. They're taking residence in the Fuller's drive with their bus, in exchange for helping with taking care of Lloyd and helping Mamoko's seed business.
This novel is imperfect and it could be accused of being message-y and sentimental (I don't see how one could avoid those accusations when one addresses GMOs and corporate farming) but I really enjoyed it.
I'm looking forward to reading more by Ruzeki.
Anna Fields' narration was extraordinary.
April 6, 2018
Oh well. After loving A Tale for the Time Being so much, it’s a pity this prior novel by the same author fell so flat!
As a brief outline, the story follows Yumi Fuller, a Japanese-American woman returning to her childhood farm in Idaho to care for her ailing parents. An alternate plot line charts the progress of a band of hippy activists travelling the states in a biodiesel van, while staging non-violent protests against GMOs.
My issues with the book were multifold – the execution was very plot-driven (at the expense of thoughtful writing and character development), many scenes were handled with a kind of predictable sentimentality, and aspects of the narrative were so lacking in believability, they verged on parody. The book ultimately felt like a vehicle for the author to voice her concerns about biotechnology, monoculture and corporate greed, while unfortunately tackling those issues in a manner that came across as preachy and didactic.
For a topic that can be so political and emotionally charged (food and GMOs), I think a more nuanced approach would have been far more effective, perhaps even in the form of an essay collection or non-fiction piece, rather than this sermon of a novel.
Verdict: Give this a miss and read the far superior A Tale for the Time Being instead!
Mood: Preachy
Rating: 5/10
Also on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BhOJDygHd...
As a brief outline, the story follows Yumi Fuller, a Japanese-American woman returning to her childhood farm in Idaho to care for her ailing parents. An alternate plot line charts the progress of a band of hippy activists travelling the states in a biodiesel van, while staging non-violent protests against GMOs.
My issues with the book were multifold – the execution was very plot-driven (at the expense of thoughtful writing and character development), many scenes were handled with a kind of predictable sentimentality, and aspects of the narrative were so lacking in believability, they verged on parody. The book ultimately felt like a vehicle for the author to voice her concerns about biotechnology, monoculture and corporate greed, while unfortunately tackling those issues in a manner that came across as preachy and didactic.
For a topic that can be so political and emotionally charged (food and GMOs), I think a more nuanced approach would have been far more effective, perhaps even in the form of an essay collection or non-fiction piece, rather than this sermon of a novel.
Verdict: Give this a miss and read the far superior A Tale for the Time Being instead!
Mood: Preachy
Rating: 5/10
Also on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BhOJDygHd...
December 7, 2013
Green protesters have more rings in their trunk than you might think. Twenty years before Brother Mendel published the first sprouts of genetic research about the peas in his garden, Nathaniel Hawthorne was already warning about the dangers of interfering with nature. In 1844, the Concord writer didn't know anything about genes, or cloned sheep, or bug-zapping corn, but he published a weird short story called "Rappaccini's Daughter." Besides giving birth to the mouthwash industry (Rappaccini's daughter can kill people with her breath), the story stands as one of the earliest American protests against meddling with an organism's traits.
Now, Monsanto and other biochemical companies are concentrating hard on genetically modified food, while spraying herbicide on mandatory labeling laws to keep consumers worry-free. Hippies screaming about "Frankenspuds" are easy to weed, but a new literary threat may be harder for the industry to squash.
Hog farmers are getting skinned alive by Annie Proulx's "That Old Ace in the Hole." And now Ruth Ozeki takes a whack at genetic engineers with a wonderful new novel called "All Over Creation." Along with Barbara Kingsolver, these politically oriented authors form a persuasive triumvirate. Their immense popularity among sophisticated women readers and book clubs means that the consumers who are most valuable to food manufacturers are being fed a diet high in anti-industry sentiments.
While Proulx's latest novel squeals like propaganda, Ozeki balances intimate and global concerns perfectly. She tells the story of a frustratingly irresponsible woman named Yumi who ran away from her parents when she was 14. A history teacher had seduced her and then pressured her into having an abortion. When her father, a fundamentalist potato farmer, discovered what she had done, it shattered their relationship and sent her flying away.
Now, 25 years later, hearing that her parents are near death, she's returned for the first time to Liberty Falls, Idaho. Her Japanese mother has descended into the fog of Alzheimer's, and her proud father is struggling through the ravages of cancer and heart failure.
They're desperate for help, but so was Yumi once, and coming home scratches open old resentments on both sides. "People said I was the apple of Lloyd's eye, the pride of his heart," Yumi remembers, "until I went rotten." Returning to this conservative farm community from Hawaii with three children from three different fathers, she feels that old sense of condemnation immediately: "I was a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes."
Cass, her best friend from middle school, has hung around, married a hardworking farmer, and gradually fallen into taking care of Yumi's parents. Now that their medical needs are so involved, though, she expects Yumi to shoulder that familial duty herself. But it's clear that Yumi has no aptitude for geriatric care. Or child care. Or even self-care. After a series of miscarriages, Cass has to swallow her resentment toward this old friend who treats her own kids so casually. The battle of love and candor between these two women is just one of many superbly drawn relationships in this novel.
Yumi's reckless life is a testament to the lingering effects of shattered affection. Having nursed her hatred for her father so long, it's not easy to nurse him. At first, they both see what they're convinced they'll see: a licentious woman determined to flaunt her offensive lifestyle and a Christian control freak full of condemnation.
Very gradually, though, Yumi is amazed to discover that her father has developed into someone far more complex. As potato farming fell by the wayside during her absence, her parents grew more and more involved in specialty seeds, running a mail-order business dedicated to preserving rare and antique plants amid the march of monoculture.
Just when Yumi can't imagine how she'll cope with her parents' medical needs (described here in graphic detail), a band of ecohippies arrives to worship her father. Calling themselves The Seeds of Resistance, this weird family of Internet-savvy Luddites has been drawn to Liberty Falls by her father's newsletter, a mixture of homespun wisdom, rants against genetic engineering, and quotations from the Bible. Rallying from his deathbed, he welcomes this strange crew with open arms. While Yumi falls back into old self-destructive habits, the Merry Green Pranksters and her Old Testament father plot to save the world.
Ozeki handles all this with a winning mixture of wit and tenderness. It's a jungle of a plot, a riot of literary species, sown with strains of deadly satire and heartrending tragedy - winding around kitchen table discussions about family duty and through the international debate on genetically modified food. She's as good with the broad comedy of wacky political protests as she is with the terrifying ramifications of genetic manipulation. She can skewer the industry's PR flaks in one chapter and serve as the midwife for long-deferred affection in the next. And she tends a thicket of metaphors about gardening, seeds, and biodiversity, describing the promiscuity of plants with as much frankness as the promiscuity of her characters.
But even after growing all over creation, Ozeki returns to her roots: the love between parents and children, a relationship beyond the sight of microscopes, more complex than any double helix, never susceptible to engineering, but always in need of careful cultivation like this.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0313/p1...
Now, Monsanto and other biochemical companies are concentrating hard on genetically modified food, while spraying herbicide on mandatory labeling laws to keep consumers worry-free. Hippies screaming about "Frankenspuds" are easy to weed, but a new literary threat may be harder for the industry to squash.
Hog farmers are getting skinned alive by Annie Proulx's "That Old Ace in the Hole." And now Ruth Ozeki takes a whack at genetic engineers with a wonderful new novel called "All Over Creation." Along with Barbara Kingsolver, these politically oriented authors form a persuasive triumvirate. Their immense popularity among sophisticated women readers and book clubs means that the consumers who are most valuable to food manufacturers are being fed a diet high in anti-industry sentiments.
While Proulx's latest novel squeals like propaganda, Ozeki balances intimate and global concerns perfectly. She tells the story of a frustratingly irresponsible woman named Yumi who ran away from her parents when she was 14. A history teacher had seduced her and then pressured her into having an abortion. When her father, a fundamentalist potato farmer, discovered what she had done, it shattered their relationship and sent her flying away.
Now, 25 years later, hearing that her parents are near death, she's returned for the first time to Liberty Falls, Idaho. Her Japanese mother has descended into the fog of Alzheimer's, and her proud father is struggling through the ravages of cancer and heart failure.
They're desperate for help, but so was Yumi once, and coming home scratches open old resentments on both sides. "People said I was the apple of Lloyd's eye, the pride of his heart," Yumi remembers, "until I went rotten." Returning to this conservative farm community from Hawaii with three children from three different fathers, she feels that old sense of condemnation immediately: "I was a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes."
Cass, her best friend from middle school, has hung around, married a hardworking farmer, and gradually fallen into taking care of Yumi's parents. Now that their medical needs are so involved, though, she expects Yumi to shoulder that familial duty herself. But it's clear that Yumi has no aptitude for geriatric care. Or child care. Or even self-care. After a series of miscarriages, Cass has to swallow her resentment toward this old friend who treats her own kids so casually. The battle of love and candor between these two women is just one of many superbly drawn relationships in this novel.
Yumi's reckless life is a testament to the lingering effects of shattered affection. Having nursed her hatred for her father so long, it's not easy to nurse him. At first, they both see what they're convinced they'll see: a licentious woman determined to flaunt her offensive lifestyle and a Christian control freak full of condemnation.
Very gradually, though, Yumi is amazed to discover that her father has developed into someone far more complex. As potato farming fell by the wayside during her absence, her parents grew more and more involved in specialty seeds, running a mail-order business dedicated to preserving rare and antique plants amid the march of monoculture.
Just when Yumi can't imagine how she'll cope with her parents' medical needs (described here in graphic detail), a band of ecohippies arrives to worship her father. Calling themselves The Seeds of Resistance, this weird family of Internet-savvy Luddites has been drawn to Liberty Falls by her father's newsletter, a mixture of homespun wisdom, rants against genetic engineering, and quotations from the Bible. Rallying from his deathbed, he welcomes this strange crew with open arms. While Yumi falls back into old self-destructive habits, the Merry Green Pranksters and her Old Testament father plot to save the world.
Ozeki handles all this with a winning mixture of wit and tenderness. It's a jungle of a plot, a riot of literary species, sown with strains of deadly satire and heartrending tragedy - winding around kitchen table discussions about family duty and through the international debate on genetically modified food. She's as good with the broad comedy of wacky political protests as she is with the terrifying ramifications of genetic manipulation. She can skewer the industry's PR flaks in one chapter and serve as the midwife for long-deferred affection in the next. And she tends a thicket of metaphors about gardening, seeds, and biodiversity, describing the promiscuity of plants with as much frankness as the promiscuity of her characters.
But even after growing all over creation, Ozeki returns to her roots: the love between parents and children, a relationship beyond the sight of microscopes, more complex than any double helix, never susceptible to engineering, but always in need of careful cultivation like this.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0313/p1...
August 31, 2020
Second read, 8.2020, 4/5
I still very much relate to my past self’s fangirling over Ruth Ozeki, which you can read below, but some things didn’t feel quite as perfect the second time around. Having now reread all her novels, I can say that I like All Over Creation the least. I don’t feel as connected to the characters as I do in A Tale for the Time Being and My Year of Meats – part of the reason being that I prefer when she uses the dual-narrative instead of this bigger mix of voices. But most of all, I don’t think that the environmental topic of this one, genetically modified plants, is handled as well as it could have. I would have appreciated some neutral information in addition to the activist vs. farmer set up.
First read, 1.2017, 5/5
I don’t know how Ruth Ozeki does it, I really don’t. I also don’t know if I can explain the way I love her books, how much they mean to me. But I’m going to try. I’ve now read all three of her novels, A Tale for the Time Being, My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. They were five star reads and some of the most influential books I’ve ever read. At this point I might even call Ruth Ozeki my all-time-favorite author. So, what do I love about her? She’s obviously a brilliant writer, creating fluent dialog, beautiful descriptions and such three-dimensional characters that you get deeply attached to. She uses multiple points of view, letting you follow very different people whose stories become intertwined in the most unexpected ways. The plots are full of surprises and even if there’s not always much happening, you just love to read about all the little things going on in the characters’ lives.
While Ozeki writes highly entertaining, emotional and compelling stories, they are also informative. One of the biggest reasons why her books feel like written for me are the environmental issues she addresses. For example, in My Year of Meats the focus is on meat production, specifically on hormones given to cattle. In All Over Creation it’s cultivation and GMO-plants. The way these things are handled is quite unique and as someone who’s vegetarian and focusing her studies on nature conservation, I find them extremely important. And there are so many other topics touched upon! All Ozeki’s novels have made me cry, though I think All Over Creation might the most emotive of her books. I was an emotional mess when I finished it, but also incredibly thankful for the beautiful story I was able to experience.
I still very much relate to my past self’s fangirling over Ruth Ozeki, which you can read below, but some things didn’t feel quite as perfect the second time around. Having now reread all her novels, I can say that I like All Over Creation the least. I don’t feel as connected to the characters as I do in A Tale for the Time Being and My Year of Meats – part of the reason being that I prefer when she uses the dual-narrative instead of this bigger mix of voices. But most of all, I don’t think that the environmental topic of this one, genetically modified plants, is handled as well as it could have. I would have appreciated some neutral information in addition to the activist vs. farmer set up.
First read, 1.2017, 5/5
I don’t know how Ruth Ozeki does it, I really don’t. I also don’t know if I can explain the way I love her books, how much they mean to me. But I’m going to try. I’ve now read all three of her novels, A Tale for the Time Being, My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. They were five star reads and some of the most influential books I’ve ever read. At this point I might even call Ruth Ozeki my all-time-favorite author. So, what do I love about her? She’s obviously a brilliant writer, creating fluent dialog, beautiful descriptions and such three-dimensional characters that you get deeply attached to. She uses multiple points of view, letting you follow very different people whose stories become intertwined in the most unexpected ways. The plots are full of surprises and even if there’s not always much happening, you just love to read about all the little things going on in the characters’ lives.
While Ozeki writes highly entertaining, emotional and compelling stories, they are also informative. One of the biggest reasons why her books feel like written for me are the environmental issues she addresses. For example, in My Year of Meats the focus is on meat production, specifically on hormones given to cattle. In All Over Creation it’s cultivation and GMO-plants. The way these things are handled is quite unique and as someone who’s vegetarian and focusing her studies on nature conservation, I find them extremely important. And there are so many other topics touched upon! All Ozeki’s novels have made me cry, though I think All Over Creation might the most emotive of her books. I was an emotional mess when I finished it, but also incredibly thankful for the beautiful story I was able to experience.
December 28, 2015
Very Barbara Kingsolvery with a little more wild wackyness - which I should have picked up on from the giant Barbara Kingsolver cover blurb I suppose. Didn't adore it quite as much as A Tale for the Time Being, but it was still an engaging novel with interesting characters wrestling with environmental issues in an interesting way. Yumi was definitely not a likeable protagonist for me, but I think that made it a stronger book, because who says protagonists need to be likeable?
March 14, 2015
I'm lukewarm on this book. Perhaps it's because I enjoyed A Tale for the Time Being so much, and that's more sophisticated than this. It was readable enough, but felt somehow too pat, too tidy, too overtly 'issues'y. Am I being ungenerous in labelling this forgettable?
April 29, 2021
If you want to read this because you read A Tale for the Time Being and you loved it, just stop there and be content.
January 7, 2013
Finally finished this. good lord. I listened to it because Anna Fields is one of my favorite narrators. She captured the characters wonderfully and I could just imagine each of their personalities in all of their weird and dysfunctional ways. Unfortunately, the writing was weak and the characters shallow (esp the main character, Yumi). Conversations went on waaaay too long, and were vapid and immature. Although I'm not as knowledgeable as I'd like to be about GMO engineering, Ozeki did seem to have a solid understanding of the subject as related by the hippie-travelers that take up resident on Yumi's parents farm in Idaho.
I didn't feel connected to many of the characters, just sorry that the kids involved had to tolerate such an inept mother, who could not seem to stop making bad decisions. It was a relief when this ended.
I didn't feel connected to many of the characters, just sorry that the kids involved had to tolerate such an inept mother, who could not seem to stop making bad decisions. It was a relief when this ended.
January 10, 2022
52 USA State Challenge - Idaho
This novel covered so many topics in an absorbing way and centred around Idaho Potato farming, which is no mean feat. Fabulous characters that I immediately had affection for.
I think some of the science of the genetic engineering of the plants was pretty dodgy, I'd have to look it up to be sure, but it's such an absorbing and terrific story that it's easy to forgive any oversights of the nitty gritty of genetic modifications of plants.
I already had a plan to read this one for this USA challenge but I'm now keen to read her new novel that came out in 2021. Maybe I can fit more of Ruth Ozeki's work in this year, with luck.
October 1, 2009
This is a rather difficult book to review and do it justice. It is about so much and has so many interwoven stories that all pull and tug against each other, and prop each other up, that to reduce the book to a summary of the events would be criminal.
If I tell you it’s about genetic engineering of foodstuff, many readers would yawn and find another book to read. But it is.
Except it’s also about a whole lot more
It is also about family and what makes a family; and what breaks one. It’s about life and death and propagation. It’s about faith and trust and forgiveness.
It has a huge cast but all of them are essential and full characters and are necessary. The stories unfold in a completely believable way and are so clear that there is never any confusion.
The main story is of the Fuller family, Lloyd, his Japanese wife Momoko and his run away and now adult daughter Yumi. Lloyd was a potato farmer but now sells seeds with his wife. Yumi ran away for home at 14 and only now, at 39, has returned to Idaho because her father is dying and her mother losing her mind. Yumi returns with her three children and a host of issues and a history which returns to bite everyone in the ass.
Added to this family saga of death, dementia, anger, love and forgiveness are the band of political activists who join forces with Lloyd in an anti-genetically modified foodstuff movement.
Throw in an abortion, a barren couple, a dodgy dude with mirror shades and a bitter and twisted small town sheriff and the result is a very well worth reading book.
If I tell you it’s about genetic engineering of foodstuff, many readers would yawn and find another book to read. But it is.
Except it’s also about a whole lot more
It is also about family and what makes a family; and what breaks one. It’s about life and death and propagation. It’s about faith and trust and forgiveness.
It has a huge cast but all of them are essential and full characters and are necessary. The stories unfold in a completely believable way and are so clear that there is never any confusion.
The main story is of the Fuller family, Lloyd, his Japanese wife Momoko and his run away and now adult daughter Yumi. Lloyd was a potato farmer but now sells seeds with his wife. Yumi ran away for home at 14 and only now, at 39, has returned to Idaho because her father is dying and her mother losing her mind. Yumi returns with her three children and a host of issues and a history which returns to bite everyone in the ass.
Added to this family saga of death, dementia, anger, love and forgiveness are the band of political activists who join forces with Lloyd in an anti-genetically modified foodstuff movement.
Throw in an abortion, a barren couple, a dodgy dude with mirror shades and a bitter and twisted small town sheriff and the result is a very well worth reading book.
June 15, 2013
I suppose Ruth Ozeki wanted to expose the evils of GMO foods and then worked up some characters around which to build a story. The protagonist runs away from home at fourteen and returns twenty-five years later with three kids in tow. Unfortunately her fourteen year old personality seems to still be in control. That personality gets annoying in spots and in others downright stupid to the point where I could no longer suspend my disbelief. Mix in her Alzheimer afflicted mother who has occasional deep philosophical insights even though she is so far gone that her husband has labeled common household objects (lamp, toaster, etc.). This goes against my experience with people with Alzheimer’s but maybe I missed something. There are other characters that don’t quite make the mark that left the book adrift in periodic anti-GMO proselytizing that mixed facts and conjectures. Is there a happy ending? If you decide to find out; good luck to you and be sure to be ready to accept some folks on the edge and over of believability.
November 14, 2024
I went into this book blind, which means I had no expectations. I definitely didn’t expect to learn so much about potato farming or seeds and genetic modified foods, none of which have reason to be as riveting as it plays out in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation
Okay, so while I did find the book interesting, I have to come clean and say it took a while to get there. Ozeki weaves multiple story threads to eventually come to a fully interconnected story. It’s a story-telling technique I love, but it does take some patience to pull it all together. And patience is required because, well, potato farming.
This book will anger and sadden you—and it should on multiple occasions and for very different reasons. The characters, especially Yumi, on which most of the narrative revolves, will annoy you to the point of giving her no sympathy or understanding. But throughout it all, the characters were very well written—fully-formed and achingly human. And the crux of the story—the environmental and health impacts of modern agriculture—remains the most important issue we refuse to face.
Okay, so while I did find the book interesting, I have to come clean and say it took a while to get there. Ozeki weaves multiple story threads to eventually come to a fully interconnected story. It’s a story-telling technique I love, but it does take some patience to pull it all together. And patience is required because, well, potato farming.
This book will anger and sadden you—and it should on multiple occasions and for very different reasons. The characters, especially Yumi, on which most of the narrative revolves, will annoy you to the point of giving her no sympathy or understanding. But throughout it all, the characters were very well written—fully-formed and achingly human. And the crux of the story—the environmental and health impacts of modern agriculture—remains the most important issue we refuse to face.
Read
January 10, 2009All over Creation, by ruth Ozeki. A.
Downloaded from audible.om.
It turns out that this was a re-read for me, but I didn’t know it until I started the book, and it is so good I didn’t mind reading it over. Yumi Fuller has a Japanese-American mother and an American father. She is raised in a small town in Idaho where potatoes are the major crop. Yumi, who stands out in her school because of her Asian heritage, always feels different from others. Because the kids can’t pronounce her name, she is called Yummy by most of the kids in school. She has an affair at the age of 14 with her history teacher and runs away from home permanently after she had an abortion. Now, 25 years later, she is living in Hawaii teaching classes and selling real estate. She receives a letter from her former best friend and next door neighbor that both of her parents are getting old and sick, and she needs to come home to figure out what to do. Yumi arrives home with her three children, each by a different father and none of whom she had married, and finds her mother in the early stages of dementia, and her father dying from colon cancer. Enter a group of present-day hippies and activists mainly interested in persuading farmers not to plant and harvest genetically modified crops. Yumi’s father, Lloyd, had always been against the newer methods and believed that one should not develop seeds, for example, that are programmed to grow once and kill their embryo seeds so that farmers always have to buy new seeds for the next year. The group of youngsters moves in and takes over the care of her parents, and helps them come to some solution about what to do with their gardening business. It’s a very heart-warming book. Anna Fields got an audi award for reading this in 2004, and indeed she did a splendid job.
Downloaded from audible.om.
It turns out that this was a re-read for me, but I didn’t know it until I started the book, and it is so good I didn’t mind reading it over. Yumi Fuller has a Japanese-American mother and an American father. She is raised in a small town in Idaho where potatoes are the major crop. Yumi, who stands out in her school because of her Asian heritage, always feels different from others. Because the kids can’t pronounce her name, she is called Yummy by most of the kids in school. She has an affair at the age of 14 with her history teacher and runs away from home permanently after she had an abortion. Now, 25 years later, she is living in Hawaii teaching classes and selling real estate. She receives a letter from her former best friend and next door neighbor that both of her parents are getting old and sick, and she needs to come home to figure out what to do. Yumi arrives home with her three children, each by a different father and none of whom she had married, and finds her mother in the early stages of dementia, and her father dying from colon cancer. Enter a group of present-day hippies and activists mainly interested in persuading farmers not to plant and harvest genetically modified crops. Yumi’s father, Lloyd, had always been against the newer methods and believed that one should not develop seeds, for example, that are programmed to grow once and kill their embryo seeds so that farmers always have to buy new seeds for the next year. The group of youngsters moves in and takes over the care of her parents, and helps them come to some solution about what to do with their gardening business. It’s a very heart-warming book. Anna Fields got an audi award for reading this in 2004, and indeed she did a splendid job.
January 31, 2018
This comic-tragic tale of one year in the life of a woman who has completely failed to take responsibility for her life is probably going to be the best book I read in 2018. The voice of the novel alternates between first person -- Yumi Fuller -- and a third person voice. Yumi has sought out male approval all her life and doesn't seem to be able to drop the habit, starting and ending with the grown man she first slept with at age 14. Everyone around her can see it, but not Yumi, who is blinded by the resentment she still feeds against her parents.
The positive force is The Seeds -- a hippie resistance group on a mission to stamp out genetically modified foods.
Also watching is Yumi's best friend -- Cass, who Yumi left behind when she ran away. Cass is the voice of reason, the steady presence in the potato fields of Idaho, the infertile wife of Will, and the new owner of Yumi's family farm.
The story lines are beautifully woven together, like the dreadlocks of the Seeds. Each character lovingly drawn or expertly skewered. I loved this book.
The positive force is The Seeds -- a hippie resistance group on a mission to stamp out genetically modified foods.
Also watching is Yumi's best friend -- Cass, who Yumi left behind when she ran away. Cass is the voice of reason, the steady presence in the potato fields of Idaho, the infertile wife of Will, and the new owner of Yumi's family farm.
The story lines are beautifully woven together, like the dreadlocks of the Seeds. Each character lovingly drawn or expertly skewered. I loved this book.
April 5, 2022
This is not a stunning work of literary genius that digs deep into the fabrics of society, but it was a very warm book, one that I could not put down once I started.
I recently ended a relationship and in the messy cloud of feelings that one has when a longterm relationship ends, I found myself feeling unmoored and untethering, keenly missing a sense of home. I find a lot of comfort in All Over Creation being a narrative so rich in the pains and wonders of tilling, growing, being rooted and of returning. All of the characters are each unlikeable and likable in their own ways, and each carries trauma in their body. It was not a book that I thought was going to be fulfilling, but I found great comfort in Yumi’s process of returning home, of how it showed that it was possible to return and to begin healing, and that even our most fallow seasons are regenerative.
I found this book so warm, kept thinking of the earthy heat from soil after a long, sunny day.
I recently ended a relationship and in the messy cloud of feelings that one has when a longterm relationship ends, I found myself feeling unmoored and untethering, keenly missing a sense of home. I find a lot of comfort in All Over Creation being a narrative so rich in the pains and wonders of tilling, growing, being rooted and of returning. All of the characters are each unlikeable and likable in their own ways, and each carries trauma in their body. It was not a book that I thought was going to be fulfilling, but I found great comfort in Yumi’s process of returning home, of how it showed that it was possible to return and to begin healing, and that even our most fallow seasons are regenerative.
I found this book so warm, kept thinking of the earthy heat from soil after a long, sunny day.
November 24, 2022
A well paced, well written, interesting read, but nowhere near as good as A Tale for the Time Being.
I did not like the use of 1st person for one character and the 3rd for everyone else. I also felt like the ending came together far more cleanly than it should have given the rest of the novel and there were a few plot points that were a bit too convenient for a realistic story.
I did not like the use of 1st person for one character and the 3rd for everyone else. I also felt like the ending came together far more cleanly than it should have given the rest of the novel and there were a few plot points that were a bit too convenient for a realistic story.
February 4, 2018
'A warm and witty saga' ... No. Not witty. Above all, not warm: the song "Nothing" from the 1970s musical A Chorus Line aptly expresses my feelings about this novel's characters. She lost me after the first seventy or so pages. See Nicola Lloyd's extensive review (one star - click link) - my take exactly.
January 2, 2018
Boise Literature for Lunch Spring 2016.
December 9, 2009
I got this book free from a yard sale early last summer. I only ever got about halfway done with it, and it's sort of amazing I even got that far, because I sort of hated this book and I didn't really like it the whole time I was reading. I know how retarded it seems that I kept going, but it’s partly because it’s like slowing down to look at an interesting car wreck and you want to see how it all might pan out in the end, and partly because it’s sitting on the back of the toilet and I go in to pee and it’s just there so I read another two pages.
So I made very slow progress through this book that I do not like at all, and maybe another part of why I sometimes continue to read a book I don’t like is that I like to be able to figure out why I don’t like it. If you tell someone you didn’t like a restaurant, you should be able to pin it on something. The food was too greasy. Too expensive. The waiter was high and spilled a mai tai down your front. So it seems like the same thing here. And I only had this vague feeling at first about why I did not like the book.
This book is about a woman who is the daughter of a WWII veteran turned potato farmer and his Japanese war bride. Her name is Yumi, but because it’s rural Idaho, everyone pronounces it Yummy. Because of this, there is liberal reference to “Na Na The Yummy Song”. Anyway, so sometime in the 70s when she’s 14 or so, she is seduced by a high school teacher with an Asian fetish and gets pregnant. He takes her into Pocatello for a hush-hush abortion, some terrible stuff goes down when her parents find out, and she runs away. Apparently she lives on the street for a couple of years and then enrolls in college. She does not go back home to Idaho. She has her first child in like 1984 or something with a gay man she knows is gay and winds up marrying and moving to Texas with him. She names this first child Phoenix.
Now, not to completely derail my faithful recounting of this narrative, but this was one of the first major things that gave me kind of that it’s-a-party-in-my-mouth-and-everyone-is-throwing-up feeling was the fact that she named her child after Professor Dumbledore’s pet bird, if Dumbledore’s bird was simply named according to his breed instead of having a real name, which incidentally was Fawkes. You know. Like people who name their dog “Dog”. At least she didn’t name him “Kid”.
Anyway, so like six years later she has a daughter with some other guy and names her “Ocean”. Groan. Then like six years after that, she has another baby, which is male and I can’t remember its real name and they call it Poo. Which I actually prefer to either of the other two children’s names.
So she is living in Hawaii and working part time doing real estate under the DBA “Yummy Acres” and teaching at the college level because she got a doctorate, I think, and then her childhood friend gets in touch with her to let her know that her dad’s colon had to be removed and he’s dying and her mom is basically completely senile. So she comes back to Idaho with her kids on a temporary basis and it pretty much sucks.
Meanwhile. Some traveling hippies pick up a foster kid named Frank somewhere further east of here and go on a pilgrimage to meet the grandparents of Phoenix, Ocean and Poo. Because, I forgot to explain, they run an organic back-to-earth heirloom seed business in addition to the potato farming. Anyway, this foster kid gets one of the hippie chicks pregnant and they all go west to teach everyone about the evils of big agriculture and foods that are genetically engineered to be more resistant to pests and disease.
So with these two things, stupid names and self-righteous hippies, I had a bad taste in my mouth. But there was something else bugging me and I couldn’t put my finger on it yet. And I slowly started to figure out that the problem I had was that the author published this book in 2003 and the book is set in 1998 and it could not be more obvious that she has no clue whatsoever what the internet was like back in 1998. It’s not like the internet has been the same all along and then it just became more popular all of a sudden. There have been some serious technological advances with respect to all that crap.
I had this vague feeling that the book was not all that accurate, even from the beginning. The hippies spend a lot of time on the internet–just exactly where, it’s not entirely clear, although I doubt this is happening at their hoopty recreational vehicle. Wireless was not really available back then. And the book relies heavily on the internet to carry certain aspects of the plot. Characters are constantly looking up each other and various information and companies on the internet. The main character “Yummy” has a website for her real estate business. Blink tag included, I’m sure. I mean, it was 1998, right?
It was bothering me but I didn’t have extremely concrete objections just yet. Back then, most “normal” people did not have much of an internet presence to speak of. Your average layperson just barely knew how to do e-mail and Yahoo search and had never even heard of Google and they called it the “World Wide Web” or just “the web” if they fancied themselves really slick. Google was so new it was like the delicate premature infant of search engines and it was something only internet nerds were buzzing about. I remember the first time I ever saw a TV commercial that had an internet address. It seemed completely crazy and I remember sitting there thinking, “Oh my god, I could look at this commercial and look at this company’s website at the same time, if only the computer and the TV were close to each other!”
Then I read a little further and by the time I gave up, I was thoroughly disgusted with the book. Apparently the pregnant girl planned to give birth at home (in their RV?) and was conducting extensive birthing research online. Part of this research involved watching videos of births in progress. At this point I was through second-guessing my memory of internet circa 1998. I know for sure that, having lived in such a place myself at the time, people in rural BFE America were not watching video on their dial-up internet in 1998. That was difficult enough on a T-1 connection in the college dorms in 2001.
In 1998 I had already been an internet junkie for years. We lived out in the sticks. I didn’t know anybody who had something better than dial-up at their actual home. The only place you could go to have “fast” internet access was a college campus, or if you were really lucky, high school. At our house out in the country, the maximum internet speed was around 2K per second. TWO KILOBYTES. I remember being really impressed that in town my boyfriend (now my husband) was able to get a lightning fast 7K per second. It only took him like ten minutes to download an MP3, which were beginning to gain popularity then. I mean, wow. That was fast. I was seriously really jealous of that. In 1998 the idea of video on the internet seemed like this absurdly unattainable science fiction dream. I didn’t know anybody who could afford the kind of equipment you’d need to put video on the internet. And not even a college T-1 was fast enough to do the kind of live video streams we see now or that the author was describing. And it would take days to download a video file even if you could handle watching it on your slow-ass 300MHz computer. We had a friend who bought a 400MHz computer with MY GOD a CD burner that summer and it was like the most amazing thing I could imagine at the time. Nowadays you would throw up in your mouth just having to look at a computer like that. But back then it was luxurious enough if you simply had a second telephone line so you could get phone calls and be on the internet at the same time. Nobody did video. Nobody.
I guess I shouldn’t get so bent out of shape. Probably most publishers don’t think it’s very important to fact-check fiction. But it still irritates the hell out of me to run into completely inaccurate stuff like this when I’m reading. It just makes it impossible to take the thing seriously and it really takes away from the story. How am I supposed to have any respect for the author’s story if she couldn’t take the trouble to do the basic groundwork to make sure she doesn’t look like a fool behind this crap?
I started this book once where the author referred to a character admiring the shiny “chassey” on her car. I believe after that she may have gotten out a “shemmy cloth”. Folks. If the chassis on your car is exposed to the point that you can see it just walking up, you may have a serious problem and you probably shouldn’t be just standing there admiring the damn thing like an idiot. And forget the chamois cloth. Seeing these ridiculous errors made it impossible to read the rest of the book, which was a terrible piece of detritus aside from that, but seriously. How can you have any regard for a person who is comfortable writing about topics on which they are completely ignorant?
Anyway. I dropped this book off in a work book swap after deciding I had my own permission to stop reading the stupid thing.
So I made very slow progress through this book that I do not like at all, and maybe another part of why I sometimes continue to read a book I don’t like is that I like to be able to figure out why I don’t like it. If you tell someone you didn’t like a restaurant, you should be able to pin it on something. The food was too greasy. Too expensive. The waiter was high and spilled a mai tai down your front. So it seems like the same thing here. And I only had this vague feeling at first about why I did not like the book.
This book is about a woman who is the daughter of a WWII veteran turned potato farmer and his Japanese war bride. Her name is Yumi, but because it’s rural Idaho, everyone pronounces it Yummy. Because of this, there is liberal reference to “Na Na The Yummy Song”. Anyway, so sometime in the 70s when she’s 14 or so, she is seduced by a high school teacher with an Asian fetish and gets pregnant. He takes her into Pocatello for a hush-hush abortion, some terrible stuff goes down when her parents find out, and she runs away. Apparently she lives on the street for a couple of years and then enrolls in college. She does not go back home to Idaho. She has her first child in like 1984 or something with a gay man she knows is gay and winds up marrying and moving to Texas with him. She names this first child Phoenix.
Now, not to completely derail my faithful recounting of this narrative, but this was one of the first major things that gave me kind of that it’s-a-party-in-my-mouth-and-everyone-is-throwing-up feeling was the fact that she named her child after Professor Dumbledore’s pet bird, if Dumbledore’s bird was simply named according to his breed instead of having a real name, which incidentally was Fawkes. You know. Like people who name their dog “Dog”. At least she didn’t name him “Kid”.
Anyway, so like six years later she has a daughter with some other guy and names her “Ocean”. Groan. Then like six years after that, she has another baby, which is male and I can’t remember its real name and they call it Poo. Which I actually prefer to either of the other two children’s names.
So she is living in Hawaii and working part time doing real estate under the DBA “Yummy Acres” and teaching at the college level because she got a doctorate, I think, and then her childhood friend gets in touch with her to let her know that her dad’s colon had to be removed and he’s dying and her mom is basically completely senile. So she comes back to Idaho with her kids on a temporary basis and it pretty much sucks.
Meanwhile. Some traveling hippies pick up a foster kid named Frank somewhere further east of here and go on a pilgrimage to meet the grandparents of Phoenix, Ocean and Poo. Because, I forgot to explain, they run an organic back-to-earth heirloom seed business in addition to the potato farming. Anyway, this foster kid gets one of the hippie chicks pregnant and they all go west to teach everyone about the evils of big agriculture and foods that are genetically engineered to be more resistant to pests and disease.
So with these two things, stupid names and self-righteous hippies, I had a bad taste in my mouth. But there was something else bugging me and I couldn’t put my finger on it yet. And I slowly started to figure out that the problem I had was that the author published this book in 2003 and the book is set in 1998 and it could not be more obvious that she has no clue whatsoever what the internet was like back in 1998. It’s not like the internet has been the same all along and then it just became more popular all of a sudden. There have been some serious technological advances with respect to all that crap.
I had this vague feeling that the book was not all that accurate, even from the beginning. The hippies spend a lot of time on the internet–just exactly where, it’s not entirely clear, although I doubt this is happening at their hoopty recreational vehicle. Wireless was not really available back then. And the book relies heavily on the internet to carry certain aspects of the plot. Characters are constantly looking up each other and various information and companies on the internet. The main character “Yummy” has a website for her real estate business. Blink tag included, I’m sure. I mean, it was 1998, right?
It was bothering me but I didn’t have extremely concrete objections just yet. Back then, most “normal” people did not have much of an internet presence to speak of. Your average layperson just barely knew how to do e-mail and Yahoo search and had never even heard of Google and they called it the “World Wide Web” or just “the web” if they fancied themselves really slick. Google was so new it was like the delicate premature infant of search engines and it was something only internet nerds were buzzing about. I remember the first time I ever saw a TV commercial that had an internet address. It seemed completely crazy and I remember sitting there thinking, “Oh my god, I could look at this commercial and look at this company’s website at the same time, if only the computer and the TV were close to each other!”
Then I read a little further and by the time I gave up, I was thoroughly disgusted with the book. Apparently the pregnant girl planned to give birth at home (in their RV?) and was conducting extensive birthing research online. Part of this research involved watching videos of births in progress. At this point I was through second-guessing my memory of internet circa 1998. I know for sure that, having lived in such a place myself at the time, people in rural BFE America were not watching video on their dial-up internet in 1998. That was difficult enough on a T-1 connection in the college dorms in 2001.
In 1998 I had already been an internet junkie for years. We lived out in the sticks. I didn’t know anybody who had something better than dial-up at their actual home. The only place you could go to have “fast” internet access was a college campus, or if you were really lucky, high school. At our house out in the country, the maximum internet speed was around 2K per second. TWO KILOBYTES. I remember being really impressed that in town my boyfriend (now my husband) was able to get a lightning fast 7K per second. It only took him like ten minutes to download an MP3, which were beginning to gain popularity then. I mean, wow. That was fast. I was seriously really jealous of that. In 1998 the idea of video on the internet seemed like this absurdly unattainable science fiction dream. I didn’t know anybody who could afford the kind of equipment you’d need to put video on the internet. And not even a college T-1 was fast enough to do the kind of live video streams we see now or that the author was describing. And it would take days to download a video file even if you could handle watching it on your slow-ass 300MHz computer. We had a friend who bought a 400MHz computer with MY GOD a CD burner that summer and it was like the most amazing thing I could imagine at the time. Nowadays you would throw up in your mouth just having to look at a computer like that. But back then it was luxurious enough if you simply had a second telephone line so you could get phone calls and be on the internet at the same time. Nobody did video. Nobody.
I guess I shouldn’t get so bent out of shape. Probably most publishers don’t think it’s very important to fact-check fiction. But it still irritates the hell out of me to run into completely inaccurate stuff like this when I’m reading. It just makes it impossible to take the thing seriously and it really takes away from the story. How am I supposed to have any respect for the author’s story if she couldn’t take the trouble to do the basic groundwork to make sure she doesn’t look like a fool behind this crap?
I started this book once where the author referred to a character admiring the shiny “chassey” on her car. I believe after that she may have gotten out a “shemmy cloth”. Folks. If the chassis on your car is exposed to the point that you can see it just walking up, you may have a serious problem and you probably shouldn’t be just standing there admiring the damn thing like an idiot. And forget the chamois cloth. Seeing these ridiculous errors made it impossible to read the rest of the book, which was a terrible piece of detritus aside from that, but seriously. How can you have any regard for a person who is comfortable writing about topics on which they are completely ignorant?
Anyway. I dropped this book off in a work book swap after deciding I had my own permission to stop reading the stupid thing.
January 12, 2024
All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki 🇨🇦
Yumi Fuller hasn't set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho - heart of the potato-farming industry since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in a brand new drama:
The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping bus, "The Spudnick", biofueled by pilfered McDonalds' french-fry oil. With a quirky cast of characters and a wickedly humorous appreciation of the foibles of corporate life, globalization, political resistance, youth culture and aging baby boomers, All Over Creation tells a celebratory tale of the beauty of seeds and growing things, and the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.
Some in our book club did not finish this book. They were interested in the potatoes, but not the characters or narrative. Because I deduct points for bad/crude language, I generously give this book 3 stars.
Yumi Fuller hasn't set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho - heart of the potato-farming industry since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in a brand new drama:
The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping bus, "The Spudnick", biofueled by pilfered McDonalds' french-fry oil. With a quirky cast of characters and a wickedly humorous appreciation of the foibles of corporate life, globalization, political resistance, youth culture and aging baby boomers, All Over Creation tells a celebratory tale of the beauty of seeds and growing things, and the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.
Some in our book club did not finish this book. They were interested in the potatoes, but not the characters or narrative. Because I deduct points for bad/crude language, I generously give this book 3 stars.
July 17, 2025
after finishing this book i thought to myself, “ruth ozeki stands in the ranks of people who write Good Fiction.” my second read from her, and maybe not as compelling as A Tale for the Time Being, but she still had me invested! i was drawn to this one because it centers around potato farmers in idaho. the story is woven from multiple perspectives— from kid being seduced into the anti-GMO movement to runaway farm child returning home after decades to good-hearted farm woman best friend— who i grew to care about very much. while the plot fell a little short for me, the characters were well-written, and the topic it explored was incredibly interesting… a solid book! one i would want to talk about with others so if you read it hmu 🤠
“No. Keeping is not safe. Keeping is danger. Only safe way is letting go. Giving everything away. Freely. Freely.'”
���But maybe that was the trick to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation?
A paradox for sure, but such a relief.”
“No. Keeping is not safe. Keeping is danger. Only safe way is letting go. Giving everything away. Freely. Freely.'”
���But maybe that was the trick to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation?
A paradox for sure, but such a relief.”
October 30, 2021
This book grapples with many of Ozeki’s consistent themes: humans’ relationship with nature (and all the glory, beauty, and degradation therein), corporate greed, the complicated interplay of science, process, and progress. I found this novel less conceptually dense than her “Year of Meats” or “A Tale for the Time Being”—but she compensated powerfully with some truly breathtaking depictions of familial bonds, generational traumas and loyalties, and just good-old friendship and affection.
September 26, 2020
4.5 stars
Another fantastic read from Ozeki with fully realized characters that you can feel strongly about, discussion of environmental topics, here GMO food, and a story that compels you forward while making you think. Focusing on a mixed race woman Yumi who ran away from home decades ago and set in the potato growing country of Idaho, as with My Year of Meats, the novel looks at family and what that means, at fertility and parenthood and at the clash between massive scale farming and human and environmental health. The ending was a little too neat but still satisfying and didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment of the book.
Ozeki is a great writer and I’m sad that this was the last of her novels left for me to read, please Ruth, gift us another soon!
Another fantastic read from Ozeki with fully realized characters that you can feel strongly about, discussion of environmental topics, here GMO food, and a story that compels you forward while making you think. Focusing on a mixed race woman Yumi who ran away from home decades ago and set in the potato growing country of Idaho, as with My Year of Meats, the novel looks at family and what that means, at fertility and parenthood and at the clash between massive scale farming and human and environmental health. The ending was a little too neat but still satisfying and didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment of the book.
Ozeki is a great writer and I’m sad that this was the last of her novels left for me to read, please Ruth, gift us another soon!
November 29, 2008
dude, i LOVE this book with all my heart & soul. if you haven't read it yet, WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? get thee to a library, you wastrel! i will try to explain what it's about, but be forewarned: it's a little complex. okay, so lloyd fuller & his wife (whose name i forget--forgive me!) are husband & wife. they are potato forms, although the wife also cares for rare seeds. when lloyd gets too old to care of his farm, they both get into the seed-saving thing & start a small business selling heirloom seeds through the mail. they sell their land to the neighbors, cassie & her husband (whose name i also forget). cassie is the childhood best friend of the fullers' daughter, yumi. yumi ran away from home when she was sixteen, after getting knocked up by her english teacher & having an illegal abortion. when lloyd found out about it, he hit the roof & yumi disappeared. cassie wants to have a child, but is having trouble conceiving & feels like maybe it's some kind of cosmic payback for having accompanied yumi to get that abortion back in the day. (but actually, it's probably because of the pesticides that the potato fields are soaking in.) meanwhile, yumi has grown up & had three kids with three different dudes. she's kind of a bohemian, but she's done okay for herself. she's living in hawaii, selling real estate. cassie tracks her down after lloyd has another heart attack & it looks like he's going to die soon. yumi's mom has a touch of dementia & just can't be counted on to look after lloyd alone, & cassie is busy managing her farm. so yumi comes back to idaho with her brood to take care of lloyd while he is on his last legs & introduce him to his grandkids. & meanwhile, a group of traveling anarchists have heard about the heirloom seed catalogue & they decide that lloyd is the environmentalist messiah, & that they are going to travel out to idaho to meet with him & make his farm their revolutionary base. their crew includes Y, who thankfully has a background as a personal care assistant; another dude whose name i forget, who is their tech guy & he falls in love with yumi; lilith is the earth goddess-y one who pays for their travels by doing earth goddess-y internet porn; charmey is knocked up & french-canadian & a great cook; & frank is a 17-year-old skater they picked up in ohio, who knocked up charmey. oh, & also, the english teacher who knocked yumi up has gone on to become a PR guy for an evil multi-national company that makes the pesticides that are making cassie infertile & which could kill all the seeds on the world. & all of these people come together in idaho & have all kinds of weird interactions & there are all these inter-weaving stories about politics, religion, gender, abortion, race (yumi's mom is japanese--lloyd met her while fighting in world war two), pregnancy, porn, direct action, technology, etc etc etc. okay? this book rules. go read it.
September 4, 2018
After finishing A Tale for the Time Being which I adored I had high hopes for more of Ozeki's work.
As expected, the prose is quite good.
Unfortunately, everything else is quite bad. As a character driven novel it fails because absolutely no one changes. There's a billion characters (more on that in a moment) but none of them have a satisfying arc, or even an unsatisfying one. There's just static (meaning both "unchanging" and "a lot of noise").
Part of the problem is unquestionably too many characters competing for emotional lead, and yet as I said none of them really experience significant growth or change for the vast majority of the novel. Granted, a few big changes happen in the last 50 pages but it was so contrived that I hardly think it overturns the statuesque impression. While we're at it, I think it's slightly unfair to call them "characters" because truthfully it's more like a gallery of cliches and lazy writing. The mouthy punk kid, the salt of the earth farmer, the evil corporate monkey, the yoga-loving hippie goddess - absolutely none of these caricatures had any unexpected depth, complexity, humanizing aspects, or quirks.
Another problem is I think the novel couldn't quite make up it's mind about what it wanted to be. Was it a family drama, an estranged woman coming to say goodbye to her dying father and facing the demons of her small town past? Is it about broken kids torn from their Hawaiian home to rural Idaho, and the small minded abuses they endure while their mom neglects them? Is it about a conclave of hippie anarchists confronting small town conservatives arguing about GMOs and the future of American food? Is it about a farm wife wrestling with regrets and loss and receiving an unexpected grace? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. See, any one of these on their own would be a decent novel if handled with Ozeki's skill, but trying to mash all of them together left me longing for a much simpler (and shorter) idea explored more deeply.
Finally, and this is really just a quibble, I really hated how inexplicably Yumi's chapters would skip around between first, second, and third person, but everyone else was in third. I'm all for playing with traditional structures, but it has to be for a REASON. This just felt like bad editing.
Tldr; Too many protagonists, not enough plot, and also somehow too much plot.
As expected, the prose is quite good.
Unfortunately, everything else is quite bad. As a character driven novel it fails because absolutely no one changes. There's a billion characters (more on that in a moment) but none of them have a satisfying arc, or even an unsatisfying one. There's just static (meaning both "unchanging" and "a lot of noise").
Part of the problem is unquestionably too many characters competing for emotional lead, and yet as I said none of them really experience significant growth or change for the vast majority of the novel. Granted, a few big changes happen in the last 50 pages but it was so contrived that I hardly think it overturns the statuesque impression. While we're at it, I think it's slightly unfair to call them "characters" because truthfully it's more like a gallery of cliches and lazy writing. The mouthy punk kid, the salt of the earth farmer, the evil corporate monkey, the yoga-loving hippie goddess - absolutely none of these caricatures had any unexpected depth, complexity, humanizing aspects, or quirks.
Another problem is I think the novel couldn't quite make up it's mind about what it wanted to be. Was it a family drama, an estranged woman coming to say goodbye to her dying father and facing the demons of her small town past? Is it about broken kids torn from their Hawaiian home to rural Idaho, and the small minded abuses they endure while their mom neglects them? Is it about a conclave of hippie anarchists confronting small town conservatives arguing about GMOs and the future of American food? Is it about a farm wife wrestling with regrets and loss and receiving an unexpected grace? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. See, any one of these on their own would be a decent novel if handled with Ozeki's skill, but trying to mash all of them together left me longing for a much simpler (and shorter) idea explored more deeply.
Finally, and this is really just a quibble, I really hated how inexplicably Yumi's chapters would skip around between first, second, and third person, but everyone else was in third. I'm all for playing with traditional structures, but it has to be for a REASON. This just felt like bad editing.
Tldr; Too many protagonists, not enough plot, and also somehow too much plot.
January 19, 2013
You know a book is good when you pick it up at 9 p.m. intending to read 10 pages or so, and the next thing you notice is that's 2 in the morning and you've chowed down on about 200 pages, a third of the book. Some parts had me laughing and the end definitely had me crying.
Yummy captivated me from the first -- the daughter of a pretty straitlaced but loving potato farmer and his Japanese wife, she's a precocious 14-year-old who is having an affair with her 23-year-old teacher. At some point, something happens and Yummy --her real name is Yumi -- runs away from home in Liberty Falls, Idaho.
Fast forward 25 years. Yummy's parents aren't doing well: he has cancer and her mother has Alzheimer's. A next-door neighbor, once Yummy's best friend, is helping the couple, but planting time is coming and she and her husband have a farm to run. So she does an Internet search and finds Yumi, who decides to come home from her teaching job in Hawaii, with 3 children in tow, each of has a different dad — a gay Japanese, a white guy, and a Hawaiian. of course things don't go smoothly.
Meantime, a group of small-time eco-terrorists -The Seeds of Revolution - are moving into the area, protesting genetically-modified crops, especially potatoes. They discover a guru in Yummy's dad -- he and his wife having been saving and propagating heirloom varieties of flowers and vegetables for years, just the way God grew them. Among the activists is a 17-year-old and his 19-year-old pregnant girlfriend. Yummy's dad allows the Seeds to stay at the farm in trade for taking care of him, his wife and their seeds.
Yummy and her best friend are mending fences, sort of. The girl left behind is married, childless, and boobless-she had a mastectomy and several miscarriages. She babysits while fuming over Yummy's parenting skills. The fuming gets worse when Yummy reignites her affair with the teacher, now a PR agent for a firm representing the creators of GMO potatoes.
The tension builds slowly till the end, which rather sad and uplifting at the same time.
The fun is in how all these people come together, drift apart, and come together again. This is a commentary on agribusiness vs, organics, young vs old, but Ozeki has a pretty deft touch, it didn't feel too preachy.
Yummy captivated me from the first -- the daughter of a pretty straitlaced but loving potato farmer and his Japanese wife, she's a precocious 14-year-old who is having an affair with her 23-year-old teacher. At some point, something happens and Yummy --her real name is Yumi -- runs away from home in Liberty Falls, Idaho.
Fast forward 25 years. Yummy's parents aren't doing well: he has cancer and her mother has Alzheimer's. A next-door neighbor, once Yummy's best friend, is helping the couple, but planting time is coming and she and her husband have a farm to run. So she does an Internet search and finds Yumi, who decides to come home from her teaching job in Hawaii, with 3 children in tow, each of has a different dad — a gay Japanese, a white guy, and a Hawaiian. of course things don't go smoothly.
Meantime, a group of small-time eco-terrorists -The Seeds of Revolution - are moving into the area, protesting genetically-modified crops, especially potatoes. They discover a guru in Yummy's dad -- he and his wife having been saving and propagating heirloom varieties of flowers and vegetables for years, just the way God grew them. Among the activists is a 17-year-old and his 19-year-old pregnant girlfriend. Yummy's dad allows the Seeds to stay at the farm in trade for taking care of him, his wife and their seeds.
Yummy and her best friend are mending fences, sort of. The girl left behind is married, childless, and boobless-she had a mastectomy and several miscarriages. She babysits while fuming over Yummy's parenting skills. The fuming gets worse when Yummy reignites her affair with the teacher, now a PR agent for a firm representing the creators of GMO potatoes.
The tension builds slowly till the end, which rather sad and uplifting at the same time.
The fun is in how all these people come together, drift apart, and come together again. This is a commentary on agribusiness vs, organics, young vs old, but Ozeki has a pretty deft touch, it didn't feel too preachy.
February 8, 2011
This book started out with a few liabilities for me... the title doesn't really draw me in as much as My Year of Meats and the subject doesn't really sound that interesting. On top of that, Ozeki's writing style is a little clunky at times -- her characterizations seem to be trying a little too hard, or come across (to me) as a little unnatural. This is especially true when she's writing in the voice of, say, a teenage boy. And the book is a little bit preachy.
All that said, I really enjoyed the way she drew all the story lines together, and, despite the sometimes awkward writing, I felt a connection to the characters. For me, that's the most important thing. Once I got a few chapters in, the book was a pretty fast read, and I stayed up late to finish it, so definitely more gripping than you'd think a book about potatoes would be.
All that said, I really enjoyed the way she drew all the story lines together, and, despite the sometimes awkward writing, I felt a connection to the characters. For me, that's the most important thing. Once I got a few chapters in, the book was a pretty fast read, and I stayed up late to finish it, so definitely more gripping than you'd think a book about potatoes would be.
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