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

USA Today: The Book of Form and Emptiness [is] a masterful meditation on consumer culture

“A masterful meditation on consumer culture . . . This novel’s meditative pacing perfectly suits its open-hearted contemplation. The book’s self-awareness allows it to comically hedge and tiptoe, to digress into diatribes into the ‘false dichotomies and hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers’ only to catch itself and sheepishly apologize: ‘Sorry. That turned into a rant. No reader likes a rant. As a book, we should know better.’ The Book of Form and Emptiness is concerned foremost with the outsiders in our world, the ones who hear voices, who are friendless, who fall into addiction and self-harm. It’s concerned, too, with the ultimate outsiders, the objects that we produce and discard, produce and discard. It is both profound and fun, a loving indictment of our consumer culture. As the novel asks the reader turning the pages, ‘has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings, too?’”
— Eliot Schrefer, USA Today

September 20, 2021
USA Today
Book Review by Eliot Schrefer