The Nakano Thrift Shop
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Alexandra Bailey
About this listen
From the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this funny, heartwarming story about love, life, and human relationships that features a delightfully offbeat cast of characters.
Objects for sale at the Nakano Thrift Shop appear as commonplace as the staff and customers that handle them. But like those same customers and staff, they hold many secrets. If examined carefully, they show the signs of innumerable extravagancies, of immeasurable pleasure and pain, and of the deep mysteries of the human heart.
Hitomi, the inexperienced young woman who works the register at Mr. Nakano's thrift shop, has fallen for her coworker, the oddly reserved Takeo. Unsure of how to attract his attention, she seeks advice from her employer's sister, Masayo, whose sentimental entanglements make her a somewhat unconventional guide. But thanks in part to Masayo, Hitomi will come to realize that love, desire, and intimacy require acceptance not only of idiosyncrasies but also of the delicate waltz between open and hidden secrets.
Animating each delicately rendered chapter in Kawakami's playful novel is Mr. Nakano himself, an original, entertaining, and enigmatic creation whose compulsive mannerisms, secretive love life, and impulsive behavior defy all expectations.
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Christmas at Tiffany's
- By: Karen Swan
- Narrated by: Katie Scarfe
- Length: 16 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cassie settled down too young, marrying her first serious boyfriend. Now, 10 years later, she is betrayed and broken. With her marriage in tatters and no career or home of her own, she needs to work out where she belongs in the world and who she really is. So begins a yearlong trial as Cassie leaves her sheltered life in rural Scotland to stay with each of her best friends in the most glamorous cities in the world: New York, Paris and London.
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Perfectly Indulgent!
- By Abby Welker on 12-05-17
By: Karen Swan
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Secondhand Spirits
- A Witchcraft Mystery, Book 1
- By: Juliet Blackwell
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lily Ivory hopes for a normal life when she opens Aunt Cora's Closet. With her magical knack for vintage fashion - she can sense vibrations of the past from clothing and jewelry - her store becomes a big hit. But when a client is murdered and children start disappearing from the Bay Area, Lily may be the only one who can unravel the crime.
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Needs a different narrator
- By A on 10-15-12
By: Juliet Blackwell
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Death at the Chateau Bremont
- Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal Mystery Series, Book 1
- By: M.L. Longworth
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When local nobleman Étienne de Bremont falls to his death from the family château, it sets the historic town of Aix-en-Provence abuzz with rumors. The once-idyllic town suddenly seems filled with people who could have benefited from Bremont's death - including his playboy brother, François, who's heavily in debt and mixed up with some unsavory characters. But just as the list of suspects is being narrowed down, another death occurs. And this time, there can be no doubt - it's murder.
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Narrator is awful
- By F. Miller on 05-06-23
By: M.L. Longworth
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Written in Dead Wax
- The Vinyl Detective, Book 1
- By: Andrew Cartmel
- Narrated by: Ben Allen
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
He is a record collector and a connoisseur of vinyl, hunting out rare and elusive LPs. His business card describes him as the Vinyl Detective, and some people take this more literally than others. For example, the beautiful, mysterious woman who wants to pay him a large sum of money to find a priceless lost recording on behalf of an extremely wealthy yet shadowy client. And so begins a painful and dangerous odyssey in search of the rarest jazz record of them all....
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Outstanding narration!
- By John S. on 01-31-17
By: Andrew Cartmel
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Secret Smile
- By: Nicci French
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Miranda's sister Kerri has a new boyfriend. He's a handsome charmer who seems to dote on Kerri. But Brendan isn't the man he says he is. Miranda should know. She broke off her own affair with him just a few weeks ago when she found him reading her diary.
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I want my 9 hours back
- By Ashley on 07-19-23
By: Nicci French
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Jane Bites Back
- By: Michael Thomas Ford
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen is still surrounded by the literature she loves, but now it's because she's the owner of Flyleaf Books in a sleepy college town in Upstate New York. Every day she watches her novels fly off the shelves along with dozens of unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations. Jane may be undead, but her books have taken on a life of their own.
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Utterly Rediculous
- By Tenaya on 05-29-10
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The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
- By: Katarina Bivald
- Narrated by: Fiona Hardingham, Lorelei King
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It all began with a correspondence between two quite different women: 28-year-old Sara from Haninge, Sweden, and 65-year-old Amy from the small town of Broken Wheel, Iowa. After years of exchanging books, letters and thoughts on the meaning of literature and life, Sara, mousy, disheveled, who has never been anywhere in her life--has really lived only for her work in a beloved bookshop, which has just closed its doors for the last time--bravely decides to accept her unknown friend's invitation to visit. But when she arrives, she finds her house empty, the funeral guests just heading home. . .
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Disappointed - no depth & poor narration
- By Kelly on 01-28-16
By: Katarina Bivald
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Eva's Eye
- Inspector Sejer Mystery, Book 1
- By: Karin Fossum
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Eva Magnus and her daughter are out walking by the river when a man's body floats to the water's surface. Eva goes to call the police, but when she reaches the phone, she dials another number altogether.
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Very little of Sejer, a whole lot of Eva
- By John Barnett on 07-04-17
By: Karin Fossum
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Mr. Fox
- A Novel
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Carol Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....
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A Great Novel, just Poor for Audio
- By James A. Dittes on 08-13-16
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Spinning Forward
- By: Terri DuLong
- Narrated by: Kate Udall
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Syd never considered the possibility of turning her passion for spinning and knitting into something more than a hobby, but when the unique composition of her wool draws attention, a door is opened - the first among many. Yet even as she ventures out of her comfort zone, Syd finds herself stepping into the embrace of a community rich with love, laughter, friendship...and secrets. And as long-hidden truths are revealed, Syd faces a choice: spin a safety net - or spin decidedly forward and never look back...
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Cliche with little character development
- By Laurie A. Johnson on 01-20-15
By: Terri DuLong
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The Woman Who Met Her Match
- By: Fiona Gibson
- Narrated by: Emma Gregory
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What if your first love came back on the scene...30 years later? After yet another disaster, Lorrie is calling time on online dating. She might be single in her 40s, but she's got a good job and wonderful children, and she's happy. This, Lorrie decides, is going to have to be enough. That is until she receives a very unexpected request from France. Antoine Rousseau, who had once turned a lonely French exchange trip into a summer of romance, wants to see her - after 30 years.
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sweet easy read
- By lzydaizy on 02-01-18
By: Fiona Gibson
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A Killer Plot
- Books by the Bay Mystery Series #1
- By: Ellery Adams
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Olivia Limoges is the subject of constant gossip. Ever since her mysterious return to the small coastal town of Oyster Bay, North Carolina, Olivia has kept to herself, her dog, and her unfinished novel. With a little cajoling from charming writer Camden Ford, she agrees to join the Bayside Book Writers to break her writer's block and even make a few friends. But when townspeople start turning up dead with haiku poems left by the bodies, anyone with a flair for language is suddenly suspect.
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My new favorite Cozy Mystery Series!
- By Christina on 09-21-15
By: Ellery Adams
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The power of honesty and an open mind
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Moshi Moshi
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The story is good but the performance is lacking
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Heaven
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Great listen
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The Flowers of Buffoonery
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The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh.
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A meandering mess
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Life Ceremony
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.
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Interesting concept but boring story
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By: Sayaka Murata
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Butter
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination, but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew, and Kajii can’t resist writing back.
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Interesting look at societal pressure in Japan
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By: Asako Yuzuki
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Before the Coffee Gets Cold: A Toshikazu Kawaguchi Book Set
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What would you do if you could travel back in time? Discover the internationally bestselling novels of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, now a worldwide phenomenon and BookTok sensation, in this special new book set. Step inside Tokyo’s whimsical Café Funiculi Funicula and travel back in time with a cast of unforgettable characters.
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very profound, lost in translation?
- By Ashlyn C. on 10-06-23
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls
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Overall
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We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves.
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The narrator says “liberry” instead of “library”
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There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
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A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.
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I LOVED it
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By: Kikuko Tsumura, and others
What listeners say about The Nakano Thrift Shop
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- miguel lopez
- 05-17-22
Cute believable slice of life romance
Narrator was captivating and made me feel as if I was a spectator within the Nakano thrift shop. Nothing super exciting, but if you are a fan of slice of life growing of age stories, this is a must read. I am a fan of descriptive novels. I enjoy the works of Haruki Murakami. Other similar books to check out with slice of life atmosphere with somber undertones: "Go" by Kazuki Kaneshiro, "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami, as well as "colorless tsukuru tazaki" by Haruki Murakami.
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- Billye Kay
- 07-13-21
A Series of Awkward Moments
The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami is an offbeat collection of vignettes and scenes that are presented as remembrances. This work lacks the depth of the author’s previous novel, Strange Weather in Tokyo. This is unfortunate because I believe that this book had the potential to take the author’s writing to a new level. There are story elements contained in the first part of the book that provide the structure for the story to turn quite dark a la Haruki Murakami. However, at the pivotal moment, the author chooses to bring the reader back to her original simply sweet, quirky, somewhat romantic story instead. This would have been fine if the book simply ended there. Unfortunately, the book loses focus and meanders for several additional chapters. I seldom criticize authors for what they did not do, but in this case it is necessary to acknowledge the hard work that must’ve gone into crafting an alternate storyline only to have it be partially removed and never brought to fruition. Hiromi Kawakami is a very good writer who brings a touch of romance to the mundane. This is a unique and precious gift to readers. While it is always important to honor their existing gifts, it is also the obligation of talented writers to continue to grow and expand the boundaries of their gifts. The narration performance provided by Alexandra Bailey was adequate to the task and included a wide range of distinct character voices. I would recommend this book only to existing fans of the author.
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- mz
- 01-03-19
Entire book is a dialogue of he said she said
Almost the entire book is a dialogue of he said she said. Any description of the surroundings is through first-person impression that only conveys shallow information.
A third into the book, I got so bored that nothing ever happens and everything is just he said she said, with quite unrelated stories. The book seems to have no coherent story line but is simply a collection of events happening at the thrift shop.
Personalities of Mr Nakano and Takeo are portrayed okay, but only from an external view, as how you would know someone if you work with them. Internal thoughts of the main character is never portrayed, so we don't learn about what kind of a person she is at all. We can only assume that she is an average city girl.
Different from the author's previous book, Strange Weather in Tokyo, this book does not have any internal reflection of the characters, nor depiction of scenes that entice the reader into the culture. The events are just everyday things that could happen anywhere.
The narrator's voice and tone don't help either. Although she uses a different voice for each character, her change of tones is too dramatic. It could be because all the dialogues in this book are so meaningless that it is difficult to narrate. Unsure whether I will finish this book. Too many good books in my wish list to waste time on a meaningless one.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Eclectic Reader
- 08-26-20
Pleasant . . .
I enjoy stories with odd characters, and pretty much everyone in this novel is an odd character. Lightly humorous, mildly romantic episodes throughout.
They all sort of bounce around doing odd things, getting involved with one another, becoming uninvolved, then later involved again.
It was a strangely pleasant way to spend 6.9 hours.
My one complaint: You would think that one of the first things the narrator would do is learn how to pronounce the name of the character, which comes up fifty times in the book. I'm pretty sure Nakano is pronounced nah kah noh--3 syllables equally stressed. To hear it pronounced NOK uh noh again and again and again was sort of distracting. It was also odd because she pronounced the other names (e.g., tah-kay-oh and mah-sah-yoh, NOT TAH-kay-oh, MAH-sah-yoh) properly.
It was sort of like a narrator of Don Quixote saying the main character's name "QUICKS oat" throughout the novel.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-11-19
A book about nothing
Really, like binge watching Seinfeld- without the comedy. (Spoiler) A character is stabbed in the street, and still I found myself desperately waiting for something to happen.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-31-19
Cute, simple story to listen to.
The beginning of this book was hopeful, but as it reached the end it died down and would have a simple ordinary ending. Cute story, and well brought up characters. It did a good job on making you feel like a friend in the group, characters were very lovable and witty
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