A lot to like here but overshadowed by how much there is to be skipped. I hate to see a rigorously well written book that loses the plot, which is not always going to be a bad thing, but in this case every time the good samurai parried the blow, the reading experience became a little more hackneyed. The dynamic between child prodigy and renegade single mother was very intriguing at first, but towards the middle, the mutual disappointing of either protagonist’s expectations felt too sad and the bursts of linguistic/artistic/mechanistic/mathematical erudition too awkward. Maybe if I had read it on the tube.