First, I want to acknowledge my impetus for reading this little book by pointing to the review at A Little Blog of Books. Then I want to give a slightly different view compared with some of the specifics of that review.

Yes, the narrative structure of The Buddha in the Attic is not typical of your every-day boring story, or is it? When I was a project manager for a large corporation I used special computer software to develop task flows for the planning and control of major projects. On more than one occasion the charts would consist of a single milestone followed by a widely expanded array of the numerous tasks that followed the milestone and then to collapse into another control point on the chart. This one to many and back to one structure is what I saw in Julie Otsuka’s interesting novel.
Looking over some of the offerings at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surprised to see that they made a movie out of William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying.
It didn’t take long but the results are a bit surprising. The Heritage Foundation, following the research done by what the