Mina's matchbox

Format
Book
Language
English (English)
ISBN
9780593316085.
;
0593316088.
Library of Congress Call Number
PL858.G37M5613 2024
Call Number
FICTION
Geographic Area Code
a-ja---
Description
280 pages ;22 cm
System Control Number
(OCoLC)1449647328
General Note(s)
Show
Summary"In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt's family. Tomoko's aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home-and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company-are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family's pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion-Tomoko's dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family's patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko's cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko's life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novel's end.? Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand-her uncle's mysterious absences, her German grandmother's experience of WWII, and her aunt's misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina's Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time-and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse"--Provided by publisher.
Uniform Title
Mīna no kōshin.English
Copies: 5 of 15 copies available
Available copies: Verona Public Library, New Adult: Fic Ogawa Y Spring Green Community Library, Adult: OGA Oregon Public Library, New Adult, 1st Floor: F OGAWA Yoko Cross Plains Public Library, Adult: F OGAWA Pardeeville-Angie W. Cox Public Library, Main Level: FIC OGA