Chicago Review of Books: Semi-Living Words in The Book of Form and Emptiness

“The Book of Form and Emptiness nurtures stories of human connection—not excluding those inherited through things both collected and discarded—as well as the transcendent magic that so many words can conjure. If one accepts that a novel and its counterparts, limited by form, cannot act as a true looking glass for its reader, then the value of a book is instead measured by a limited number of words that seek to convey and impact our shared realities. In the liminal space of form and emptiness, it is stories, especially those bound safely inside books, that tether us to life. Ozeki’s novels tend to speak for themselves. After all, “[b]ooks will always have the last word, even if no one is around to read them.””
— Caitlin Stout, Chicago Review of Books

The Guardian: The Book of Form & Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki review – a Zen chorus

“Ozeki is carefully celebrating difference, not patronising dysfunction. Out of their fractured relations, she makes something so satisfying that it gave me the sense of being addressed not by an author but by a world, one that doesn’t quite exist yet, except in tenuous parallel to ours: a world built out of ideas that spill into the text like a continuous real-time event. The voice of a commentary on the present – or of the commentary of the present upon itself.”
— M John Harrison, The Guardian

Washington Post: If a book could talk, what would it say? Ruth Ozeki has some ideas.

“One of Ozeki’s gifts as a novelist is the ability to enfold provocative intellectual material within a human story grounded in sharply observed social detail. Her emotional engagement with her characters and her themes makes The Book of Form and Emptiness as compelling as it is occasionally unwieldy . . . The Book itself has a marvelous voice: adult, ironic, affirming at every turn the importance of books as a repository of humanity’s deepest wisdom and highest aspirations.”
— Wendy Smith, The Washington Post

September 25, 2021
The Washington Post
Book Review by Wendy Smith

LA Times: Objects and ideas come to life in Ruth Ozeki’s mad, floating literary world

“A vivid story of fraught adolescence, big ideas and humanity’s tenuous hold on a suffering planet . . . Ozeki, an imaginative writer with a subversive sense of humor, has an acute grasp of young people’s contemporary dilemmas. . . She doesn’t offer anything as complete as salvation but something more real: a profound understanding of the human condition and a gift for turning it into literature.”
— Mary Ann Gwinn, LA Times

September 23, 2021
LA Times
Book Review by Mary Ann Gwinn