Behind all of this floated something more personal, a deeper set of unresolved questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I belong?
That’s what compelled me to start writing this book.
The author of the lauded novel "A Tale for the Time Being," Ozeki teaches at Smith College in Massachusetts. She's also a Zen Buddhist priest. This book ponders the very nature of things. Does the soul exist? Is it immortal? Do inanimate items possess a life force? How do we distinguish acute sensitivity from mental illness? These questions fuel a searching novel, one that combines a coming-of-age tale with an ode to the printed page.
Writing about dreams can be a dangerous business. Unless the shimmering ambiguities and surreal tone of the dream world are handled with exquisite care and precision, the dream can turn to mush and smoke on the page. Pepper manages the fraught dream material well, and by the second page this reader was hooked.