My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki – 3 Stars

[Hannah]

Jane is a Japanese-American TV producer who gets a job producing a Japanese show about cooking beef. The show is sponsored by a meat-exporting business, and throughout the process, Jane uncovers information about the meat industry. I really wanted to like this book more than I did, and I did learn about the meat industry, but at times the bits about the meat industry just jarred with the rest of the story, and it made the second half of the book a bit of a drag. Ozeki explained in her author’s note why she wrote the book in the way she did, but I still disliked the jumps between telling the story from the first person and the third person. This was ok as a debut novel, but if I had not previously read and enjoyed other books by this author, I probably would not read another by her.