All Over Creation - Hardcover

Ruth Ozeki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670030910 ISBN 13: 9780670030910

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2003

Synopsis

Returning home to the Idaho potato farm she fled twenty-five years earlier, Japanese-American Yumi struggles with her father's terminal illness, her mother's Alzheimer's, her former best friend, and a former lover who once offended the town. By the author of

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being. Her critically acclaimed independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been screened at Sundance and aired on PBS. She is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in British Columbia and New York City.

Visit www.ruthozeki.com and follow @ozekiland on Twitter.

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for Ruth Ozeki and All Over Creation:

"All Over Creation opens wider with every plot twist as it moves from tenderness to comedy to sobering truth and the whole world in the eye of one family's storm. This is Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang updated by thirty years, with modern environmental challenges on the map and women in the front seat, driving the story. Hooray, Ruth Ozeki rides again." -Barbara Kingsolver
author of The Poisonwood Bible

"Ruth Ozeki is bent on taking the novel into corners of American culture no one else has thought to look-but where she finds us in all our transcultural and technological weirdness. With a combination of humor and pathos that is all her own, All Over Creation brings the American pastoral forward into the age of agribusiness and genetic engineering. The result is a smart and compelling novel about a world we don't realize we live in."

-Michael Pollan
author of The Botany of Desire

"Ruth Ozeki is a writer of great passion and purpose. She fearlessly tackles big issues, stirs up revolutions, and unveils truths with keen insight and humor that touches our hearts and opens our minds." -Gail Tsukiyama
author of The Samurai's Garden

"All Over Creation is a wholly original novel of amazing richness, a tapestry of zany characters who follow their own hearts and passions. With a natural storyteller's ability to communicate both the hilarious and profound, Ozeki writes about love and sex, bioengineering and social responsibility, deftly communicating her uncanny feel for the texture of contemporary American life." -Paula Sharp
author of Crows Over a Wheatfield

Reviews

"Every seed has a story," says Geek, an environmental activist in Ruth Ozeki's new novel (after My Year of Meats), which is all about seeds-real and metaphorical ones. The Seeds of Resistance is a small anti-biotech group targeting Nu-Life potato, a laboratory-designed tuber produced by agribusiness company Cyanco. Heading for the heart of potato country, the ragged activists end up in Liberty Falls, Idaho, encamped at the home of Lloyd and Momoko Fuller, elderly purveyors of natural seeds. Though they're hardly radicals, the Fullers are also opposed to genetic modification of plants. Against the odds, the hippie Seeds and the conservative Fullers become friends. It is the other adult in the Fuller household, their only daughter, Yumi, who is suspicious of the Seeds. Yumi is an ex-hippie living in Hawaii, but she's returned home to care for her parents (her father is recovering from his last heart attack; her mother has Alzheimer's). Emotionally, Yumi is rather a mess. She has a bit of a problem with alcohol, and is unable to resist inappropriate guys, having three kids with as many men (Phoenix, 14; Ocean, 6; and baby Poo). A classic "bad seed," Yumi ran away from home at 14, after having an affair with her history teacher, Elliot Rhodes; back in Liberty Falls, she runs into Elliot and is again attracted. He is working for Cyanco's PR firm, spying on the Seeds. When the Seeds hold a Fourth of July potato protest on the Fullers' property, Elliot arranges for them to be arrested, with dire consequences for Lloyd. Apart from some awkward dialogue (the Seeds invariably intersperse their sentences with "dude"), this quirky novel is bewitching. Yumi's bumpy relationship with Lloyd and Lloyd's unexpected fondness for the Seeds are especially well rendered. Ozeki's story splices a bit of Edward Abbey into an Anne Tyler plot. The fruits of this mix are definitely worth tasting.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats (1998), offered a unique perspective on family, food, and corporate greed, themes that also shape her second lively and provocative ecosaga. Yumi Fuller ran away from tiny Liberty Falls, Idaho, in 1974 at age 14 after having an affair with a teacher. Now living in Hawaii with her three children, she hasn't seen her folks in 25 years, but when Cassie, her girlhood friend, tracks her down to tell her that Lloyd is dying and Momoko has Alzheimer's, she brings her spunky tropical offspring to her chilly and judgmental birthplace. Cassie, a breast cancer survivor, and her farmer husband now own most of the Fullers' land and are experimenting with genetically altered potatoes, while Momoko and Lloyd run a much-loved heirloom seed company that has attracted the avid attention of a generous and gutsy group of antibioengineering activists called the Seeds of Resistance. As the Seeds and Yumi and her kids converge on the Fuller homestead, spectacular conflicts and revelations ensue. Ozeki's characters are utterly charming, and she writes with sensitivity and inventiveness about the complexities of love and nature, deftly humanizing the thorny issues raised by biotechnology with humor and panache in a tale rich in suspense and pathos. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

After the surprise hit My Year of Meats, Ozeki presents the travails of former hippie Yummy.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670030910
• ISBN 13: 9780670030910
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432