Mizuki is resentful and justifies her affair with the intoxicating Kiyoshi as revenge for her husband's own extra-marital affairs, disdain and neglect. Her character driven unique observations ignited more than a few snort fests in an otherwise somber conundrum. By the time Pring was also turning out to be a total rat I was getting a little weary with the women tangling themselves in knots trying to cope with this behavior and Ms Siddons was using the word alabaster too frequently. Set in Tokyo, the novel begins with housewife Mizuki debating jumping off the balcony of her highrise apartment where she lives with her husband and two children.

Interesting light read about a southern belle, her 16 year old daughter and younger, wayward sister. Skipped so much in that, her sister and daughter disappear from the pages for the last third of the book totally killed the vibe. Ultimately, Mitzuki realises that she will have to make some incredibly difficult choices and sacrifices, and which ever ones she makes, it means that she has to compromise again for the sake of her family. A bittersweet love story and a piercing portrait of female identity, it introduces Emily Itami as a debut novelist with astounding resonance and wit.Tatsu, her husband, doesn’t seem as if he even cares enough to be upset at this state of their stale marriage, which only leads to more resentment for Mizuki. But her traditional role as a housewife and her husband's rejection of her as anything other than a servant to him and a caretaker of their children makes that impossible.

I appreciated this how Emily Itami showed the protagonist’s unhappy feelings about domesticity, married life, and having kids. A lyrical story about love and a fascinating look at the collision of old and new traditions in modern Tokyo. At the age of thirty she married Heyward Siddons, and she and her husband lived in Charleston, South Carolina, and spent summers in Maine. The story goes from Atlanta, where Merrick does nothing but take care of everyone -- her mother-in-law with Alzeimer's who almost sets the house on fire, her teenage daughter recovering from anorexia, and her often-absent doctor husband -- to Hollywood, where Merrick's younger sister is trying to become an actress and also will need her help.

Special thanks to my GR friends Kat, Michelle, Christina, and Regina for inspiring me to read this book! In Fault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. I will admit, however, is that the reader’s thick British accent is not what I would’ve envisioned for this novel. The second half was much faster and didn't build on much from the first half other than that the marriage was rough. Mitzuki, the protagonist of Emily Itami’s brilliant debut novel Fault Lines, finds herself not only submerged in a world of expectation and comparison, but is also trying to face the cultural expectations that are placed on Mitzuki as a Japanese housewife.

It started off better than expected and in the first few chapters I so wanted to smack Pom I found it upsetting.Perfection from the cherry blossoms on the beautiful cover, to the Tokyo setting, and everything in between, I loved it beyond just the plot. This was another Marmite book, but yet again, after hearing the author chat about the book, her upbringing and her hectic life as a mum, author and teacher, the book took on a whole new meaning. Her life is airless, packed with stultifying tasks: “Japanese motherhood and its attendant housewifery is a cult,” says Mizuki.

The book was bogged down in so many paragraphs of flowery descriptive passages that I grew weary of them right away, and the characters were hard to cheer for with the exception of tiny amounts of time here and there which always seemed to disappear far too soon for me. It’s really hard to tell you all how much I loved Fault Lines, because I want you to read it to see for yourselves. But if you get to know somebody, and find out you laugh at the same things, and share strange tics; if it gets so good you only need to catch their eye to know what they're thinking, you are, it is blindingly clear, totally screwed. Although I could understand where Mizuki was coming from, being that this book was about an affair, it was nowhere near as exciting as the plot description made it seem. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.A brilliant novel about the frustrations of motherhood and marriage, made all the more interesting for being set in Japan. She and her husband Tatsu seem to have hit a communicative brick wall, both exhausted and lacking enjoyment in their lives.