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.
I really really like Ruth Ozeki's writing style and that the environment always plays a big role in her novels. After I read "A Tale for the Time Being", I was delighted to jump into "All over Creation" now, and I didn't get disappointed. Despite the fact that the protagonist Yumi Fuller was not my favourite character of all, and even a bit annoying for my personal taste, I loved the story and the core theme of organic farming vs. genetically modified crops & food. From the hippie-gang with their Spudnik rallying all over the place, to Yumi's parents Momoko & Lloyd. Momokos little seed garden was something I pictured so cool in my head, I'd love for it to have been a real place I could visit. Yumi's "best friend" from childhood days Cassy & her husband Will were also a couple I could connect to on a personal level (with the issues they had as a couple trying to start a family). Cassy seemed like she become MY best friend throughout the book. Thanks to Ruth Ozeki's brilliant writing style I could understand and comprehend the thoughts and actions of all the different characters, even though their views were often opposing each other. The only one I really couldn't come to like was Yumi herself. Like I said it didn't make the story less interesting for me, but it was just a bit tiresome to get over her juvenile actions in my mind, as well as her behaviour towards her parents AND her children (who she didn't interact much with throughout the whole book, that's one point in itself that made me angry). So for that I have to take 1 star away from the otherwise compelling story of nature, where our food comes from & how to save the world a tiny bit at a time.
What do You think about All Over Creation (2004)?
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.
—Michael
“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; and2. 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.”
—BrokenTune
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.
—Will
